BERLIN, Sept 26: German police boarded a Dutch airliner at Cologne airport on Friday and arrested two men suspected of planning to take part in terrorist attacks.

A police spokesman identified the suspected militants, on a KLM aircraft about to take off for Amsterdam, as a 23-year-old Somali and a 24-year-old German born in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu.

“It all went off in quite an unspectacular manner,” he told Reuters television.

Police in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of western Germany said they suspected the men were planning a violent form of jihad, or holy war, and had found farewell letters.

“It looks as if they were on their way to a terrorist training camp, possibly in Pakistan or Afghanistan,” said terrorism expert Rolf Tophoven.

Somalia is riven by a civil war pitching Islamist rebels against an Ethiopian-backed government.

A large number of Somali refugees have moved to western Europe over 17 years of conflict.

“The origin of the (suspects) is not surprising because Somalia has for some time been a place where Al Qaeda commandos stay and make preparations,” said Tophoven.

Unlike Britain and Spain, Germany has not suffered a major recent attack on its own soil but Germans have been fearful since the northern port of Hamburg was used as a base for planning the Sept 11 attacks on US targets.

Officials had discovered documents in the suspects’ luggage which pointed to terrorist intentions, said security sources, but police stressed there was no indication the two were about to launch an attack.

“German police authorities removed two passengers from the plane...All the passengers had to get out for a check of all the luggage, and they removed the suspects’ luggage,” said a spokesman for KLM.

The flight, KL1804, continued its journey to Amsterdam just over an hour later.

A spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry said there were no firm signs of an attack in Germany.

“We still believe we are caught in the crosshairs of terrorism but there are no indications of concrete preparations for an attack,” she told a regular government news conference.

Security sources said they were not excluding the possibility that the two men arrested on Friday had loose contacts to a group of people in the western Sauerland region, three of whom were arrested last year..—Reuters