Karlsruhe, Germany  - Ger

Karlsruhe, Germany  - German prosecutors said Friday two men had been arrested on suspicion of links with the Pakistan-based Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), a group seen as a modern successor to al-Qaeda.

Omid S, 27, an Afghan-born German national, and Huseyin O, also 27, a Turkish national, were taken into custody by federal police on Thursday in the Frankfurt area.

Both were accused of travelling to an IJU camp in the Afghan-Pakistan border area last year and taking supplies including binoculars, torches, and MP3 players to the remote camps.

Karlsruhe, German - German police have arrested a 30-year- old Turk on suspicion of recruiting fighters for the terrorist network al-Qaeda, justice officials said Saturday.

Omer O. was detained Friday in Sindelfingen in the south of Germany on the basis on an arrest warrant issued by the federal High Court.

Officials said O. collected donations and organized equipment for al-Qaeda terrorists on behalf of Aleem N., a Pakistan-born German resident who was arrested in February on terrorism charges.

The cash and equipment, including bullet-proof vests and a laptop, was taken by N. to the Pakistan-Afghan border between 2006-2007 and handed over to al-Qaeda operatives, the officials said.

Karlsruhe, Germany - Three alleged Islamist terrorists, two of them Germans who had converted to Islam, planned bomb attacks on a string of German cities and the main US air base in Germany, federal prosecutors said Friday.

The prosecutors in Karlsruhe named the alleged target cities as Frankfurt, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Munich and Cologne. The US air base at Ramstein near Frankfurt was another potential target, they said.

Police, who had bugged the plotters' communications and surreptitiously confiscated the main ingredient in the explosive, arrested the men a year ago.

Karlsruhe, Germany - Taking a tough line on the bribery scandal that has shaken conglomerate Siemens, Germany's top appeal court ruled Friday that it was a crime to set up a slush fund.

It instructed a lower court to hear anew a case against two executives who misappropriated corporate money to bribe managers at Italian electricity company Enel into buying Siemens power equipment.

The ruling was part of the German legal system's toughening stance towards corporate corruption and may lead to harsher sentences on the two men. The trial court had believed it was a crime to pay a bribe, but not to set aside the money in corporate coffers to do so.