°®Âþµº

The man, identified only as Yamen A., was held at dawn by special forces in the northeastern town of Schwerin, the federal prosecutor's office said in a statement. Several apartments were also searched in the region, which is north of Berlin.

He is suspected of having "planned and already concretely prepared an Islamist-motivated attack in Germany using very powerful explosives," the statement said.

"It has not yet been established whether the suspect already had a target in mind or not," it said, adding that prosecutors did not have any information whether the suspect belonged to "a terrorist organisation."

The Syrian had made a decision "no later than July 2017 to explode a bomb in Germany with the aim of killing and wounded as many people as possible."

In the following weeks, he began to acquire the chemical products and materials necessary to build a bomb.

German police have been on high alert to the threat of attacks, particularly after a truck rampage claimed by the Islamic State group killed 12 people in Berlin last December.

A report published in September found that Berlin authorities had missed several opportunities to arrest and deport the driver, Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri. 

Officials admitted a series of security failures that allowed Amri to register under multiple identities and evade authorities while he was in contact with militants.

‘False flag plot’

Germany has taken in more than one million asylum seekers since 2015, many from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, sparking an anti-foreigner backlash and a spate of racist hate crimes.

But concerns were raised in May when two German soldiers were revealed to have posed as Syrian migrants to plot the false-flag assassination of pro-refugee politicians.

The suspect, identified only as Maximilian T., aged 27, was detained from the same Franco-German army base near Strasbourg where his co-conspirator, Franco Albrecht, was also stationed.

The pair had drawn up a list of pro-refugee politicians to kill, including former German President Joachim Gauck and Justice Minister Heiko Maas.

Albrecht was set to carry out the attack while Maxilimilian T., who served in the same infantry battalion, created the death list and helped procure a French-made handgun from Vienna.

Another man, 24-year-old student Mathias F, was also arrested for planning the murder, which the group had hoped would "be seen by the population as a radical Islamist terrorist act committed by a recognised refugee", prosecutors said.

Both Maximilian and Albrecht were part of online far-right extremist chat groups, while it has emerged that the latter expressed extremist views in a 2014 master's thesis which theorised that immigration would end Western civilisation.