EXTREMISTS WHO POSED AS MIGRANTS-GERMANY

BERLIN—Germany is investigating 40 tips about suspected Islamist extremists security officials believe could have entered the country posing as migrants, the federal criminal office said on Wednesday, highlighting concerns that the chaotic entry of more than a million migrants last year has made the country more vulnerable.

The recent terror attacks in Paris and Istanbul, which involved terrorists posing as refugees, have increased concerns about large-scale, uncontrolled migration. At the same time, polls show fears have been rising among Germans of a terror attack in the country, which has been spared anything on the scale of those that have hit Paris or Brussels.

The BKA, Germany’s federal bureau of investigation, has received 369 tips since the start of the migrant crisis about possible members of terrorist organizations or radical Islamists being among the influx of new migrants last year, a spokeswoman said, adding that of those, 40 cases are now being investigated by federal and state authorities.

The number of tips has nearly doubled since early January, when the BKA had received 215 tips, which led to 18 of the investigations now in progress, the spokeswoman said. 

After playing down for months the risk Germany faces, security officials have sounded more alarmed. Police and security officials have warned that hundreds of thousands of migrants entered the country last year without proper registration as authorities were scrambling to process as many as 10,000 migrants a day.

In February, police detained two Algerian men believed to be part of an Islamic State-linked group suspected of planning an attack in Berlin, in a sweep that included raids on refugee shelters. Investigators also discovered that Salah Abdeslam, believed to be the only surviving suspect with direct involvement in the November Paris attacks, travelled to Germany shortly before the attack to pick up at least two people in the city of Ulm.

“I’m not telling a secret if I say that I’m worried about the high number of migrants whose identity we don’t know for sure because they entered without valid passports,” Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of the domestic intelligence office told a conference last week.

Mr. Maassen said intelligence services believed that it was possible Islamic State used the migrant stream over the Balkan route to smuggle in terrorists posing as migrants, mostly to show its capabilities and spread fear.

Security officials said a lack of resources, bureaucratic bottlenecks, legal obstacles and the scale of last year’s flow left authorities unable to tell actual and would-be criminals from those fleeing war and violence. Since then, Germany has made efforts to get the situation under better control, conducting raids across the country to register illegal migrants and revamping its system to improve the exchange of information across states.

The number of migrants has also dropped sharply in recent months, since the closing of the Balkan route and an agreement with Turkey to stem the tide of migrants. 

Still, “the risk Germany and Europe faces remains high. Further attacks from Islamic terror cells can’t be excluded,” the BKA spokeswoman said.