German Probe Will Focus on Iraqi Militant Organization

German prosecutors said Saturday that they had opened an investigation into Ansar al Islam, an Iraqi militant group linked to a security alert at a military hospital in Hamburg last week.

“We are conducting an investigation into possible membership of a foreign terrorist organization. The investigation is directed against unknown individuals,” a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe said. She confirmed a report in the weekly Der Spiegel magazine that the inquiry was directed at Ansar al Islam and would try to establish whether the radical Islamic group had an active cell in Germany. She gave no further details.

The United States says Ansar has links to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network and has been fighting coalition troops in Iraq.

Hamburg state Interior Minister Dirk Nockemann said Washington had passed on information that Ansar may have planned a suicide attack on a Hamburg military hospital. U.S. officials declined to comment.

In December, police in Munich said they had arrested a suspected Ansar member in an inquiry into the possible recruitment of suicide bombers in Germany.