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German police have raided apartments across Germany in an operation aimed at foiling an alleged plot to perpetrate terror attacks using remote-controlled model aeroplanes, Germany’s Spiegel is reporting.

Spiegel, one of Germany’s leading media outlets, said that the dawn raids involving around 90 officers had been conducted in cooperation with Belgian law-enforcement agencies and that two Tunisian-born men were at the centre of their investigations.

“They are suspected of having sought to acquire information and equipment necessary to carry out ‘radical Islamist explosive attacks using remote controlled airplanes,’ according to a statement on the website of Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutors’ Office”, the report stated.

“According to the Stuttgart public broadcaster SWR, some of the suspects are students at the University of Stuttgart, where they are taking courses in aerospace engineering. As part of those courses, they learn how to use GPS to program model airplanes to fly specific routes,” it added.

The two men of Tunisian origin were described as having come under the sway of radical Islamist ideology, but they are not thought to be members of a known terrorist organisation.

This has been a busy week for anti-terrorism in Europe. On Monday, French police arrested six people on suspicion of planning terror attacks in France.