The German police had received information about plans to carry out a bomb attack on a gurdwara in Essen by a group of teenagers from one of the suspects' mother some weeks before an explosive was detonated there, media reports have claimed.
Even though the police in North Rhine Westphalia had initiated some punitive measures and took other steps after receivng the information on the attack plans from one of the suspects' mother, a final evaluation of the documents given by her took place only on April 26, ten days after the attack on Nanaksar Satsangh Sabha Gurdwara, the reports said.
Yussuf T and Mohammad B, 16, the two main suspects in the attack as well as their 17year-old accomplice Tolga I had drawn up detailed plans to fight "infidels" and made notices and sketches on a writing pad.
The trio also assigned different tasks among themselves and picked up Yussuf as the "Emir" (group leader) while Tolga was given the responsibility to procure money and Mohammed was put in charge of "assembly", TV channels WDR and NDR and the Munich daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported, citing the findings of an investigative work by a team of their journalists.
Tolga's mother, who found the writing pad in her son's room, was alarmed by the plans being hatched by the three teenagers and handed over to police photos of the notices and sketches three weeks before a selfmade bomb was allegedly detonated by Yussuf and Mohammad at the entrance of the Nanaksar Satsangh Sabha Gurdwara on the evening of April 16, the report said.
The explosion ripped through the entrance hall of the Sikh temple, causing serious injuries to a 60yearold priest, who was hospitalised. Two others were treated for minor injuries at the scene of the blast.
The interior ministry of NRW said last month that the two men wanted to explode their bomb, a fire extinguisher filled with explosives, inside the gurdwara, which hosted a wedding ceremony attended by over 200 wedding guests a few hours earlier, but they could not break in through the entrance door.
Most of the wedding guests had left the gurdwara to attend a reception in a nearby hall when the bomb was detonated.
The three suspects in the bomb attack have been known to the security authorities in different connection, but the information on them collected by various departments were not put together for a long time, the report said.
Yussuf participated in an antiradicalisation programme of the Interior Ministry for more than six months. Mohammad has been under police observation since he presented himself as "Kuffar Killer" (killer of infidels) on his Facebook profile.
All the three men were also known to police because of their close contact with a radical clergy at a mosque in the nearby town of Duisberg.
Even though the police had initiated some punitive measures and took other steps after receiving the information on the attack plans from Tolga's mother, a final evaluation of the documents given by her took place only on April 26, 10 days after the attack, the report said, citing official documents.
The police in the town of Gelsenkirchen admitted on Monday it was a failure that they did not react resolutely to a warning received from Yussuf’s school in January.
The head of the secondary school had informed the police that Yussuf had shown to his fellow students a video of the detonation of a self-made explosive device on his mobile phone.
Several says after the explosion, investigators found the video of the explosion of a selfmade bomb on a USB drive taken from Mohammad's house during a raid.
Investigators now believe that it was a "trial detonation" for the attack planned on the gurdwara.
