Suspected Extremists Detained in Germany

BONN — Police seized weapons, ammunition and a bust of Adolf Hitler in raids Wednesday on 60 apartments belonging to suspected right-wing extremists.

Fifty men were detained in the three-state sweep, which also uncovered a terrorist organization in its infancy, said Silvia Nemetschek, a state prosecutor in Lower Saxony state.

Police fanned out over North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt states in raids on dozens of homes of suspected neo-Nazis.

Officials in the Celle prosecutor’s office, near Braunschweig where most of the searches occurred, initially said it was a raid on the Nationalistic Front, a neo-Nazi group outlawed last November.

But Nemetschek said that while some of those detained had been front members, the raids were not directed at it but rather confirmed suspicions of a “terrorist organization” in the making.

Police seized an undisclosed amount of weapons and ammunition, documents, computer disks and a computer, Nazi symbols and a bust of Hitler, Nemetschek said.