German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the country’s gun laws need to be tightened after police foiled a suspected coup attempt by a far-right group last week.
These “are not harmless crazy people but suspected terrorists who are now in custody,” Faeser said in an interview with the Bild am Sonntag newspaper published on Sunday.
Police on Wednesday arrested 25 people on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. Those arrested belonged to a “terrorist organization” that was prepared to commit acts of violence to achieve its goals, the German attorney general said.
Authorities need to “exert maximum pressure” to remove their weapons, Faeser was quoted as saying by Bild.
She said the German government would “soon tighten gun laws further,” according to the report.
The plotters include members of the extremist Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich) movement, which refuses to recognize the modern German state and aims to replace it with an authoritarian new system.