German police on Tuesday arrested a teenage asylum seeker suspected of planning a suicide attack in Berlin, Brandenburg state officials said, according to the BBC.
The 17-year-old suspect was arrested in the Uckermark district, Interior Minister Karl-Heinz Schröter announced.
Brandenburg police, however, would not confirm reports that the teen, who entered Germany in 2015, is Syrian and was definitely planning an attack.
Special forces arrested the teenager after police received a tip-off, Brandenburg police tweeted. He had sent a message to his family saying farewell and that he was joining the "jihad", the police said, according to the BBC.
The message was sent via WhatsApp in the past week and Brandenburg authorities received the tip-off late on Monday from two other German states.
The Brandenburg interior ministry said the suspect was Syrian but police tweeted that neither the "Syrian nationality" nor "concrete attack plans" could yet be confirmed, and that investigations continued.
Germany remains under a high-threat terrorist alert following a series of attacks on the country over the past year.
In the first attack, a 17-year-old Afghani with an axe attacked passengers on a train in Wurzburg before being shot dead by security forces.
In the second incident, an attacker set off a bomb in a restaurant in Ansbach, killing himself and wounding 12 others.
The most serious attack took place in December, when terrorist Anis Amri drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 48. ISIS later claimed responsibility for the attack.
The suspect arrested on Tuesday had been living in a home for unaccompanied underage refugees in Uckermark, north-east of Berlin, since 2016 and had never before come to the attention of police, noted the BBC.
He is currently being questioned and the home is being searched by the state criminal investigation office, Brandenburg police said.
Details of the alleged plot cannot be released due to police operations, which are ongoing, the police added.
In April, a 16-year-old Syrian refugee was convicted in western Germany for planning a bomb attack and sentenced to two years in a youth prison.
Earlier this month, a Syrian man was convicted in Germany of membership in a terrorist organization after he served for ISIS in his homeland and later helped plan an attack in Berlin that was never carried out.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shavuot in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)