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Online chats were apparently found between the suspect and other Islamists in which he attempted to recruit them to the intelligence agency to mount an attack on “non-believers”, carrying out a bomb attack on the spy HQ “in the name of Allah”.

He used several different names online and his activities were uncovered about a month ago.

The man’s family reportedly knew nothing of his conversion to Islam two years ago and subsequent radicalization.

The suspect was thought to have pledged allegiance to Mohamed Mahmoud, the Austrian leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorist group.

Germany is on high alert following several terror attacks over the summer.

The BfV estimates there are about 40,000 Islamists in Germany, including 9,200 ultra-conservative Islamists known as Salafists, Hans-Georg Maassen, who leads the agency, told Reuters in an interview earlier this month.

“We remain a target of Islamic terrorism and we have to assume that Islamic State or other terrorist organizations will carry out an attack in Germany if they can,” he said at the time.

ISIL claimed two attacks in late July – on a train near Wuerzburg and on a music festival in Ansbach – in which asylum-seekers wounded 20 people in total.

In addition, security forces had to respond to an attack in a shopping centre in the city of Munich in which nine people were killed by an 18-year-old German-Iranian who had been in psychiatric treatment and was obsessed with mass killings.