Hundreds of German police including specialist commandos combed a residential area of the eastern city of Chemnitz on Saturday for a man suspected of planning a bomb attack, after failing to find him in a raid on an apartment.

 

The deployment followed a tip-off from the domestic intelligence service, though the "where, when, how and why" of the planned attack remained unclear, said Tom Bernhardt, spokesman for the Saxony state criminal investigation office.

 

During the raid on the apartment in the Fritz-Heckert neighborhood, the commandos set off an explosion. Police asked local residents to remain inside.

 

"The cordoned-off area is so wide that we can almost rule out a threat to the local population," Bernhardt said.

 

Bernhardt said it was unclear if one or several suspects were involved. He could not say whether the motivation for the planned attack was far-right or Islamist, nor whether police found explosives in the apartment raided.

 

Germany had until the summer been spared the kind of militant attacks suffered by neighboring France and Belgium.

 

But in late July, Islamic State claimed two attacks - on a train near Wuerzburg and at a music festival in Ansbach - in which asylum-seekers wounded 20 people in total.