Three men are charged in connection with a foiled 2007 terrorist plot in central Germany, the federal prosecutor's office has said.

Frank Wallenta, a spokesman for federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe, said on Tuesday that Fritz Martin Gelowicz, 29, Daniel Martin Schneider, 22, and Adem Yilmaz, 29, were each charged with membership in a terrorist organization.

Gelowicz and Schneider are German citizens while Yilmaz is a Turkish citizen who lived in Germany.

Wallenta only said that if convicted, they face a possible 10 years in prison. He refused to reveal the suspects' attorneys.

The suspects, he said, are accused of being members of the Islamic Jihad Union, an offshoot of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a jihadist group with origins in Central Asia.

According to the US State Department, the Islamic Jihad Union has ties to Osama bin Laden and fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar. It says the members have been trained in explosives by al-Qaeda instructors.

The suspected terrorists had stockpiled 730 kilograms of highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide at a rented cottage in central Germany in preparation for their plot - enough to build bombs more powerful than those that killed 191 commuters in Madrid in 2004 and 52 in London in 2005, German authorities say.

Officials said they could have mixed the peroxide, purchased from a chemical supplier, with other substances to make explosives equivalent to 550 kilograms of dynamite.

Authorities say they had all undergone training at camps in Pakistan run by the Islamic Jihad Union, and had formed a German cell of the al-Qaeda-influenced group.

The three suspects have all been in custody since police arrested them on September 4, 2007. No trial date has been set yet.

FTP/PA