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BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Six suspects detained last week by police in two separate cases are not Islamic extremists but are still dangerous, Hungarian lawmakers said Wednesday.
A court added there was no information linking the case of four of the suspects to any terror group or organized crime.
Zsolt Molnar, chairman of Parliament's national security committee, said after a closed hearing with Janos Hajdu, director of Hungary's Counterterrorism Center, that the suspects were radicals with a confused ideology.
Other lawmakers said police had likely prevented "very serious crimes" with the detentions.
Two people whose car contained machine guns, ammunition and silencers were detained Friday and placed under preliminary arrest by a court.
Two Hungarians and two ethnic Hungarians from Slovakia were detained Saturday near Budapest after explosives were found in their car, but a court rejected a request to keep one of them, identified only as Roland S., in custody. Police later found a "bomb lab" and homemade explosives during house searches.
A statement from the Budapest city court which rejected the detention of Roland S. said the explosives confiscated by police, including different types of grenades, had been found by the suspects — described as World War II enthusiasts and hobbyists — using a metal detector in a forest near the city of Veszprem.
The court, noting that the suspect had no criminal record and lived with his mother and stepfather, also dismissed the Counterterrorism Center claims of "international ramifications" in the case.
"There is no data about extremist views and — beyond the fact that two of his partners are Hungarians from Slovakia similar to him in age and with similar interests — no data about international contacts, either," the court concluded.
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