Germany arrests three suspected of Islamic State links

BERLIN (Reuters) - German police arrested three men in Berlin on Tuesday on suspicion of having close links to Islamic State militants and planning to travel to the Middle East for combat training, a police spokesman said on Tuesday. The three men, aged 21, 31 and 45, are formally suspected of having prepared "a serious act of violent subversion" for planning to attend combat training; the police spokesman said there was no indication of any concrete plan to carry out an attack in Germany. The newspaper Bild reported that the three suspects had close links to Islamic State members in Syria and Iraq and were frequent visitors of a mosque in the Berlin district of Moabit that Anis Amri, who attacked a Berlin Christmas market in December, also used to visit. The police spokesman declined to comment on the background of the suspects, but confirmed that police had raided a mosque in Moabit. Amri killed 12 people when he drove a truck into the market on Dec. 19, the worst of a spate of attacks on random members of the public in Germany over the past year. (Reporting by Michael Nienaber; Editing by Kevin Liffey)