Investigators doubt ‘Islamist extremists’ responsible for Dortmund soccer bus explosions

German investigators have all but ruled out that the suspects behind the three explosions that left one Borussia Dortmund player with serious arm injuries are Islamist extremists.

More likely, investigators told the BBC on Saturday, the suspects are “violent soccer fans” or native “political extremists.”

These extremists were first suspected of being responsible after Dortmund police recovered three letters at the scene of the crime. The letters, written in broken German, reportedly said the attack was done “in the name of Allah,” and warned similar attacks against athletes and others would continue unless Germany withdrew its warplanes from Syria and closed the Ramstein Air Base in southern Germany, where the United States keeps part of its drone fleet.

It was those demands, prosecutor Frauke Koehler told the BBC, that led investigators to no longer suspect Islamic State involvement in the explosions. Islamist extremists, he indicated, don’t often negotiate.

Koehler also said the letters appeared to be written by a native German speaker attempting to sound foreign by inserting intentional grammatical errors.

As investigators turn toward other suspects now, the fate of a 25-year-old Iraqi who police arrested earlier this week remains unknown. The man was alleged to have once led an IS fighter group before fleeing to Germany.

Meanwhile, police are reportedly looking in to whether violent soccer hooligans or political extremists from either the far-right or the far-left are to blame.

Soccer hooliganism in Europe has gotten ugly in the past. In 2015, police in Gelsenkirchen, which is located about 21 miles outside of Dortmund, arrested nearly 200 people at a soccer game between Schalke and Bayern Munich.

Police blamed fans of Bayern and a rival team of Schalke, Bochum, for what they said was an “extremely violent attack,” according to Fox Sports, that left “many people injured, some seriously.”

“Only a swift and consequent intervention by police forces prevented worse,” authorities continued.

Authorities are also looking at political extremists in the country including Nazi apologists, from whom Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel newspaper claimed to receive its own letter calling the attacks a “warning” and using racist language.

So far, there have been no follow-up attacks in Dortmund, which rebounded after losing the first leg of its Champions League quarterfinal against AS Monaco a day after the attacks, by beating Eintracht, 3-1, at home in Bundesliga play on Saturday.

The team is slated to travel to Monaco next week to play the return leg of its Champions League quarterfinal.