Germany Says It Foiled Bomb Plot

On Aug. 17, one of the suspects, using a false name, rented a vacation house in Oberschledorn, a village a long drive north in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, prosecutors said.

On Saturday, the suspects began transferring the phony chemicals from the Black Forest to the vacation house, where they had also collected detonators and electronic parts.

That prompted police to sweep in and make the arrests Tuesday, prosecutors said.

"It was a huge shock for the residents," Heinrich Nolte, mayor of the district that includes Oberschledorn, said in a telephone interview.

But Hildegard Hellwig, an Oberschledorn homemaker, said people in the village had begun to whisper in recent days about unusual activity near the rented house on Oak Lane.

"There was a car parked in a field," she said. "The people near the field knew it didn't belong there. In a village, something like that gets noticed."

A security official identified the alleged ringleader of the cell as Fritz Martin Gelowicz, 28, of Bavaria state. Prosecutors named the two others as Adem Y., 28, a Turkish national, and Daniel S., a 21-year-old German, following the German practice of withholding the surnames of suspects.

Police transported the three men by helicopter Wednesday to a court in Karlsruhe, where they appeared before a judge in closed session. The court ordered them held on charges of membership in a terrorist organization.

Staff writers Walter Pincus and Ann Scott Tyson in Washington and special correspondent Shannon Smiley in Berlin contributed to this report.