German police shut down mosque linked to extremists

German authorities on Tuesday raided apartments linked to an extremist mosque in the city of Hildesheim visited by Tunisian failed asylum seeker AnisAmri, who drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market in December and killed 12 people.

German authorities on Tuesday raided apartments linked to an extremist mosque in the city of Hildesheim visited by Tunisian failed asylum seeker AnisAmri, who drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market in December and killed 12 people.

The local state interior ministry said more than 300 police searched the apartments of eight people and shut down the mosque and the association which ran it, saying it recruited young Muslims to join ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria.

The association was a hot spot for extremists, an organization that gave support to men and women that wanted to join the inhuman terrorist organizations in Syria, Iraq and who were possibly planning to commit terrible attacks here in Germany,” Lower Saxony Interior Minister Boris Pistorius said.

Authorities raided the mosque in the summer of 2016 over suspicions that it was radicalizing Muslims and encouraging them to travel to war zones in Syria and Iraq.