German police investigate 40 refugees for terror links: media

Germany's federal investigators have opened cases against dozens of people who have arrived in Germany seeking asylum for suspected terror links, German media reported on Wednesday.

Since the beginning of the refugee wave last year, the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has received some 369 tip-offs about potential suspects, according to German newspaper "Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung".

Forty of these tip-offs have become more concrete, prompting investigations of some individuals on suspicion of belonging to a terror organization and preparing a serious crime.

"More terror attacks cannot be ruled out," a spokesperson for the BKA told the newspaper, adding, however, that they currently have no concrete evidence of a planned attack.

In response the BKA's statistics, Wolfgang Bosbach, interior affairs expert for Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party, warned that there are massive problems with the registration of refugees when they arrive in Germany.

In recent months, some 60 percent of new arrivals have reached Germany without passports or identity papers, Bosbach said.

"The dangers that arise from this must be taken very, very seriously -- that is something that the attacks in Paris and Brussels have also made clear to us," the CDU politician said.

The opposition Left party, however, warned against anti-refugee "scaremongering."

"The possibility that individual IS members -- perhaps even trained attackers -- could be among the large number of refugees should not lead us to put every asylum seeker from Iraq and Syria under general suspicion," the party's domestic policy spokesperson Ulla Jelpke said. Endit