Swiss police searching Geneva for suspected jihadists

Police in Geneva on Thursday raised the alert level and searched the city for severalsuspected jihadists believed to have links to the Islamic State (IS) group, officials said. 

The security services in the Canton of Geneva said they had received information on Wednesday from Swiss federal authorities about suspicious individuals in the Genevaarea. 

The Tribune de Geneve newspaper, in an unconfirmed report, said the intelligence originally came from the United States. 

"We went from a vague threat to a specific threat," Geneva security spokeswoman Emmanuelle Lo Verso said, adding that police were "actively searching" for the suspects. 

The office of Switzerland's top prosecutor said in a statement it had opened a probe into "a terrorist threat in the Geneva region," targeting unnamed individuals over possible support for banned groups, including "Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State". 

The statement said the probe was opened on Wednesday and that federal authorities were coordinating with their Geneva counterparts.

"The main goal is to prevent a terrorist event," it added. 

The searches, though apparently not linked to last month's deadly attacks in Paris, came amid widening efforts across Europe to hunt possible IS supporters. 

In Brussels on Thursday, European Union lawmakers backed plans to track airline passenger names as part of efforts to prevent a repeat of the Paris violence, some of whose perpetrators travelled freely across Europe before the carnage.

And in Britain, which applauded the passenger tracking plan, new Home Office data showed that the number of terror suspects apprehended has reached a record high, with 315-terror-related arrests in the year to September -- an increase of a third over the preceding 12 months.