German minister: more deaths possible in outbreak (AP)

BERLIN – Germany's health minister is warning that the number of deaths from an E. coli outbreak may increase — but he's hopeful that the worst is over.

The world's deadliest E. coli outbreak, which officials have traced to German-grown sprouts, has so far killed 33 people and sickened nearly 3,100.

Health Minister Daniel Bahr was quoted Saturday as telling the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that "the wave is gradually abating — there is reason to hope the worst is now over." He said it is unlikely the outbreak will flare up again.

But he is cautioning that "further deaths are not ruled out, as painful as that is."

Health officials said Friday that sprouts from a farm in northern Germany caused the outbreak, which prompted many in Europe to shun vegetables over recent weeks.

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German E. coli outbreak: Death toll rises

(CNN) -- The European Union on Wednesday agreed to pay 210 million euros ($307 million) to farmers who suffered losses due to the E.coli outbreak that has killed at least 25 people, mostly in Germany.

The figure is up considerably from the 150 million euros EU agriculture officials proposed Tuesday, and Dacion Ciolos, the EU's agriculture commissioner, said that figure may change again.

"This envelope will enable us to respond to the compensation requests for the period from the 26th of May through to the end of June," Ciolos said. "We will then take stock of the situation and see whether we need to adjust these figures."

Farmers in several European countries are seeking to be paid back for losses they suffered after being wrongly blamed for the outbreak. Farmers who grow cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and lettuce will be eligible to receive up to 50 percent of the average market price they would have received, based on figures from 2008-2010, the EU said.

Some producers could get up to 70 percent of market prices when funds from EU-supported producer organizations are included, Ciolos said.

The planned settlement still needs to be accepted by EU member states on June 14, Ciolos said. Spain alone has sought more than 400 million euros ($600 million) in lost farm exports of cucumbers, tomatoes and other produce from the past few weeks, and farmers in Belgium, France, Holland and even Germany say they have millions in losses, too.

The death toll from the outbreak rose to 25 on Wednesday as German health authorities confirmed two more E.coli fatalities there. All but one of the 25 were in Germany, while the remaining victim died in Sweden after a having visited Germany.

Local officials in the German state of Lower Saxony said another man, aged 73, also died, but he had other health problems as well, so they are not certain his death was due to E. coli.

There are a total 2,648 cases of E. coli infection in Germany, according to the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's top health authority. But Health Minister Daniel Bahr said Wednesday the number of new cases of infection has been falling significantly.

There have also been a handful of infections in a dozen other European countries, but they appear to be linked to northern Germany.

The cause of the 10-day-old crisis still has not been conclusively identified. There was no trace of E. coli in a pack of bean sprouts in a household in Hamburg, where a man had become infected, health authorities there told CNN Tuesday.

The sprouts came from the farm which officials believe could be the source of the outbreak. But initial tests showed no sign of E. coli there, agriculture officials in the German state of Lower Saxony said Monday.

But authorities said that does not mean their suspicions were wrong; they would not expect to find evidence of E. coli if the tainted sprouts were no longer in the supply chain.

And Wednesday, Lower Saxony agriculture officials said three workers at the suspect farm had diarrhea in early May and at least one has been diagnosed with the dangerous strain of E.coli.

Authorities have also found that a cafeteria in the town of Cuxhaven, where 18 people came down with the infection, had also received sprouts from the farm in question, said Natascha Manski, a spokeswoman for the state agriculture ministry.

CNN's Frederik Pleitgen in Berlin and David Wilkinson in London contributed to this report.

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Early tests: No E.coli in German sprouts

Berlin (CNN) -- No traces of the deadly E. coli bacteria have been found in initial tests at a German bean sprout farm suspected of being the source of the outbreak that has killed at least 22 people, agriculture officials in the state of Lower Saxony said Monday.

But authorities said they might not find any evidence of E. coli if it affected only a batch of bad sprouts and is no longer in the supply chain.

Test results are back for 20 of the 40 samples, Lower Saxony officials said Monday. It's not clear when the rest of the test results will be available.

On Sunday, officials said German-grown sprouts are the likely source for the E. coli outbreak.

Gert Lindemann, agricultural minister in Lower Saxony, said there is a "direct link" between a company in the town of Bienenbuettel and "these people getting sick." The firm has been shut down and its products have been recalled, Lindemann said.

It is not immediately clear how the E. coli strain may have gotten into the sprouts, officials said. No E. coli has been found in the company.

The company, Gaertnerhof, said Monday that it was recalling all products.

Gaertnerhof said in a statement it was "shocked and worried.... that part of our production has been linked to E.coli infections" and had never had a problem in its 25 years of growing sprouts.

It said it had found no evidence of E. coli during routine testing in January or during tests in response to the health scare in May.

But a leading German microbiologist said Monday that bean sprouts were a "plausible" source of the infection.

Sprouts can contain bacteria, which then spread in the growing process, said Alexander Kekule of the University of Halle-Wittenberg.

"Either it was inside the seed, which I do not think is the case, or the bacteria was inside the water," Kekule said on Germany's NDR radio. He is not working directly on the case.

Sprouts are bred in large drums that are heated to just over human body temperature. That is both the ideal temperature for sprouts and bacteria to grow, the agriculture ministry of Lower Saxony said.

Authorities say the infection may have taken place too long ago to be found at the company itself. But several restaurants and cafeterias linked to the outbreak got sprouts from the company, officials said.

Two workers at the agricultural company have come down with severe cases of diarrhea; in at least one of those cases, E. coli was the cause, Lindemann said.

Bienenbuettel is in the district of Uelzen in north-central Germany.

The outbreak of a virulent strain of E. coli has infected more than 2,200 people in at least 12 countries, European health authorities said Sunday.

All but one of the 22 fatalities were reported in Germany, where officials say it's too early to determine whether the peak of the outbreak has passed. One person in Sweden also died after visiting Germany.

Last week, Spain vehemently rejected suggestions that its cucumbers could be blamed, after the European Food Safety Alert Network said E. coli was found in organic cucumbers originating from Spain, packaged in Germany and distributed to various countries.

Authorities called for the cucumbers to be pulled from sale.

Germany later said Spanish produce was not the source of the infection, and furious Spanish farmers are now demanding hundreds of millions of euros in compensation from Germany.

Jose Maria Pozancos, the head of the Spanish fresh produce exporters group Fepex, wants Germany to apologize formally, pay Spanish farmers at least 400 million euros ($584 million) for their losses, and help Spain repair damaged consumer confidence.

Spanish produce exporters have seen a 40% decline in demand since the crisis began, Pozancos said.

In Germany, there have been 627 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) -- a form of kidney failure -- in the current European outbreak, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. That's more cases of HUS than in any other recorded outbreak, worldwide.

Fifteen patients in Germany have died of HUS, according to the center, while six died of enterohemorrhagic E. coli, a strain that causes hemorrhaging in the intestines and can result in abdominal cramps and bloody diarrhea.

Reports indicate that an estimated 1,605 people have that E. coli strain so far but do not have HUS, according to the center.

Infections have also been identified in Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, according to the organization.

Two women and a man who traveled last month to northern Germany remain hospitalized in the United States with HUS, Chris Braden of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. A fourth person developed bloody diarrhea, but was not hospitalized, he added.

Two U.S. service members in Germany also developed diarrhea, Braden said. "We have no expectation that this will spread in our country," he added.

The U.S. government website foodsafety.gov says that since 1996, "there have been at least 30 reported outbreaks of food-borne illness associated with different types of raw and lightly cooked sprouts. Most of these outbreaks were caused by Salmonella and E. coli."

The World Health Organization says that in 1996, "an outbreak linked to contaminated radish sprouts in school lunches caused 9,451 cases" of E. coli in Japan.

CNN's Frederik Pleitgen, Al Goodman and Per Nyberg contributed to this report.

CNN

Iceland eruption ending, German airports reopen (Reuters)

STOCKHOLM/REYKJAVIK (Reuters) – Iceland's volcanic eruption has died down and is no longer spewing out ash, officials said on Wednesday and airlines began to get back to normal after cancelling about 1,000 flights in northern Europe.

European air traffic agency Eurocontrol said it expected the ash cloud would dissipate overnight and did not see any significant disruption to travel in Europe on Thursday.

The explosion of the Grimsvotn volcano on Saturday caused much less chaos than an eruption last year at another Icelandic volcano thanks to new rules for airlines, but the incident showed problems remain with the regulations. Budget airline Ryanair was vocal in its criticism.

Hrafn Gudmundsson, a meteorologist at the Icelandic met office, told Reuters that mainly steam was coming from the crater, with no ash plume detected since 0300 GMT.

"There are indications that it's ceasing really," he said.

University of Iceland geophysicist Pall Einarsson said it was unlikely, though not impossible, that the volcano would begin disgorging significant amounts of ash again.

"At this stage we can at least hope for the worst to be over in terms of ash production," he said.

"At the moment there is practically no ash being produced and what little there is is being deposited on the glacier that is immediately around the crater."

After the eruption, the most powerful by Grimsvotn since 1873 and stronger than the one at Eyjafjallajokull that caused air traffic chaos last year, a massive plume of ash spread across northern Europe.

Flights in Scotland and northern England were canceled on Tuesday, while four German airports -- Bremen, Hamburg and Berlin's Tegel and Schoenefeld -- closed on Wednesday only to be reopened hours later.

Dutch airline KLM resumed flights to affected destinations after a brief break.

Eurocontrol said about 450 flights were affected in Germany following a similar number of disruptions a day ago across northern Europe.

"Tomorrow, we do not expect any significant impact on European airspace," it said.

Eurocontrol had earlier said the ash could drift to Poland, but a Polish air traffic control official said no traffic limitations were due.

President Barack Obama, who left Ireland early on Monday to travel to Britain to avoid being caught by the ash, is due to arrive in Poland later this week.

The ash cloud from Grimsvotn belched as high as 20 km (12 miles) into the sky after the eruption, but did not trigger the kind of travel chaos caused by Eyjafjallajokull when more than 10 million people were hit by a six-day European airspace shutdown. That cost airlines $1.7 billion.

Grimsvotn's eruption did expose disarray among the authorities who decide on aviation safety as they try to apply new rules to avoid another mass closure of European airspace.

PATCHWORK

New procedures put the onus on airlines to make judgments on whether it is safe to fly through ash, in coordination with the forecasting authorities, particularly the Volcanic Ash Advisory Center at the British Met Office, and civil aviation bodies.

Sources told Reuters a British research plane designed to sample ash remained grounded for a second day in a wrangle over its deployment.

Ryanair on Tuesday said it had safely sent two planes into what authorities had deemed high ash zones over Scotland, and criticized "bureaucratic incompetence."

International Airlines Group CEO Willie Walsh also said his company had flown a plane into an ash zone. "The simple answer is we found nothing," he told BBC radio.

He called for the British authorities to use multiple sources of data when deciding on how to react to ash problems.

"The potential for a patchwork of inconsistent state decisions on airspace management still exists," IATA Director General Giovanni Bisignani said in a statement, calling on Tuesday for more coordination.

Grimsvotn is Iceland's most active volcano.

Though the Open University's David Rothery expressed optimism this eruption was over, he added: "However, it will be back - next week, next year, or more likely next decade."

(Writing by Simon Johnson and Patrick Lannin in Stockholm, additional reporting by Niklas Pollard in Stockholm, Tim Hepher in Paris, Kate Kelland and Avril Ormsby in London, Annika Breidthart and Eric Kelsey in Berlin, Philip Blenkinsop and Robert-Jan Bartunek in Brussels; Editing by Matthew Jones)

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German train evacuated over terrorism scare

BERLIN (AP) — German police say 250 passengers were evacuated from a high speed train as authorities feared a possible terror attack.

Stuttgart Federal Police spokesman Steffen Zaiser said Friday there was "sufficient threatening evidence" to fear an attack on the train from Berlin, bound for Interlaken, Switzerland.

He said police and sniffer dogs searched the entire Inter City Express train near the southwestern city of Freiburg around midday, but did not find explosives or any other dangerous material.

Zaiser declined to elaborate on the reasons for the search, citing the ongoing investigation. The DAPD news agency cited a police source as saying that a CD-ROM found on the train pointed to an Islamic terrorist link.

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Al Qaeda suspects to face German court

The three were arrested FridayThere is heightened concern in Germany over al QaedaScores of Germans have traveled to Pakistan training camps in recent years

(CNN) -- Three men suspected of belonging to al Qaeda are expected to appear in a German court on Saturday.

German federal police arrested the three a day earlier, a counterterrorism official told CNN.

The German official told CNN that arrests were made in Dusseldorf and Essen, but he did not provide more details.

The three are expected to appear in court in Karlsruhe on Saturday. No details of impending charges are known, but the federal prosecutor's office has scheduled a Saturday news conference.

Several German news outlets reported that chemicals useful in the production of explosives were found on the suspects and that those arrested were suspected of "plotting a significant attack."

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported that one member of the group -- identified as Abdeladim K., a German resident of Moroccan descent -- is believed to have received training overseas and to have been in frequent online communication with a senior al Qaeda operative in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region in the lead-up to his arrest. According to the magazine, the suspects were arrested after German authorities intercepted communications referring to a "test" in a several-months-long investigation that also saw the involvement of the CIA.

The arrests "succeeded in averting a concrete and imminent danger, presented by international terrorism," German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said in a statement. They also showed "Germany remains a target of international terrorists."

German authorities have not indicated whether they believe the group had selected a specific target, though German media outlets noted that the Eurovision song contest, a pan-European televised national musical talent contest, is being held in Dusseldorf in mid May.

The arrests come at a time of heightened concern in Germany over the threat of al Qaeda terrorism.

Last November, Germany raised its alert level after intelligence suggested al Qaeda was plotting a "Mumbai-style" attack against the country as part of a broader conspiracy against European cities.

Islamic militants staged assaults against several targets in the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008.

A German intelligence official told CNN Friday that while concerns had eased over the plot, security forces remained vigilant.

In September 2007, German authorities broke up a plot to attack American servicemen in the country by a German terrorist cell trained in bomb-making by the Islamic Jihad Union -- an al Qaeda-affiliated Uzbek group based in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The four plotters, who were convicted of the plot in a trial held in Dusseldorf last year, had amassed 100 times more peroxide-based explosives than had the bombers of the London subway in 2005.

German media outlets have reported that the plot allegedly foiled in Germany Friday was on a similar scale to the 2007 plot.

German intelligence officials have grown increasingly concerned about the numbers of German Islamist extremists traveling for jihad in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

While most are believed to travel there to fight in Afghanistan, their presence in the tribal areas of Pakistan has provided al Qaeda and affiliated groups with opportunities to recruit operatives for plots against the West.

German intelligence officials said several militants from the German port city of Hamburg who travelled to train in Pakistan's tribal areas were involved in an al Qaeda attack plans against Europe last fall.

According to German officials, information from one of them -- Ahmed Sidiqi -- helped prompt an unprecedented U.S. State Department travel advisory for Americans travelling in Europe. Sidiqi subsequently provided useful intelligence to German counterterrorism agencies, according to German intelligence officials

According to German authorities, more than 200 Germans have traveled to training camps in Pakistan in recent years. German intelligence officials told CNN that more than 40 are still believed to be fighting and training in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

The arrests come just two weeks after one of the Germans currently thought to be in the tribal areas purportedly released a message calling for attacks in Germany. The message came from Mounir Chouka, an extremist who had lived in Bonn.

According to a translation of the message by the SITE Intelligence Group, Chouka urged attacks in Germany following what he called a "pyramid system," in which priority should be given to targeting the head of state, then federal officials and soldiers, and finally average citizens.

intelligence officials said Chouka is one of two brothers who have emerged as German spokesmen for the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The brothers are suspected of facilitating the recruitment of dozens of Germans into the IMU, including Ahmed Sidiqi's Hamburg group.

Of greatest concern however are the 100 or so German jihadists who have returned home. According to a German intelligence source, many of them are under observation by German intelligence agencies because of their continued support for extremist Islamist views and their continued communication with al Qaeda-linked militants in Pakistan.

Homegrown radicalization has emerged as a significant problem in Germany in recent years, fuelled according to German intelligence officials by the rise of social media and the emergence of German-language jihadist sites that have called on German Muslims to fight American troops in Afghanistan.

In March, two American servicemen were killed when a German Islamist extremist boarded their bus at Frankfurt airport and shot them at point-blank range. The alleged shooter, Arid Uka, was Facebook friends with several prominent German Islamist extremists, according to German intelligence officials.

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8 killed in German pileup caused by sand storm

By Bernd Wustneck, AFP/Getty Images

A motorist drives through a sand storm in the eastern German town of Fahrenholz on Friday.

EnlargeCloseBy Bernd Wustneck, AFP/Getty Images

A motorist drives through a sand storm in the eastern German town of Fahrenholz on Friday.

Rostock police spokesman Volker Werner said rescue operations were still underway and the death toll could rise.

At least 41 people were injured, many of them seriously, and were brought to nearby hospitals. Others who suffered shocks or bruising received treatment on the spot, Werner said.

In total some 110 people in 80 cars and three trucks were involved in the crash a few kilometers from the Baltic Sea, Werner said. At least 17 vehicles caught fire, including a truck carrying flammable material.

"Unfortunately, it looks like the death toll could rise further," Werner said. Several corpses were thought to be in the burnt vehicles, he added.

"One truck has crashed on a car, so we don't know yet how many people are in the car below it," he said.

The crash in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania state was caused by a sand storm, but it was unclear if this was down to a sudden lack of visibility or by sand on the road, Werner said.

Strong winds may have carried the sand from nearby fields — one of them freshly ploughed — to the four-lane highway, Werner said.

The region has recently experienced prolonged dry conditions, affecting agriculture and leaving many soils exposed to erosion.

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