Turkish authorities arrested the suspects during several coordinated raids in southern and eastern Turkey. Turkish television station NTV said the 37 individuals are suspected of being members of the IJU, a terror group that formed in Uzbekistan in 2002 but has since moved its base into Pakistan.

Several of the arrested are accused of having received training by terrorists in camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, German news magazine Der Spiegel reports.

Experts say the IJU has a few hundred armed members, but despite its limited size the group has tried and succeeded in staging spectacular attacks.

In 2004, it claimed responsibility for suicide attacks on the U.S. and Israeli embassies in the Uzbek capital Tashkent. Dozens of people were killed.

The IJU made headlines in Europe for the first time in September 2007, when German police foiled what they said would have been one of Europe's most devastating terror attacks.

Police arrested two Germans and a Turkish national who had amassed explosives to bomb U.S. and other facilities all over Germany, with potentially deadlier consequences than the attacks that hit Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005.

Authorities later arrested another suspect in Turkey, a German national, charged with providing materials to build a bomb. He has since been extradited to Germany, where the trial against the four men started Wednesday in Dusseldorf.

They are charged with conspiracy to murder, plotting of bombing attacks and membership in a terrorist organization. Some 200 witnesses are expected to make the court proceedings last at least two years. It's the most significant trial against Islamic terrorism the country has ever seen.

The trio arrested in Germany -- Fritz Gelowicz, 29, Daniel Schneider, 23, and Adem Yilmaz, 30 -- had been under surveillance for months when special police stormed their hideout in rural western Germany. The prosecution said Atilla Selek, 24, the German national arrested in Turkey, used his ties to the Islamist scene in Turkey to help the group acquire 26 detonators.

They had also amassed several barrels of hydrogen peroxide, which can be used to make explosives, equivalent to hundreds of pounds of TNT. Their ire is directed at the U.S. presence in Germany and the German military's involvement in Afghanistan, where Berlin has some 4,000 troops with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

In Germany, the very existence of the group had alerted authorities to the threat of home-grown terrorism.

The Germans are Muslim converts who had been radicalized in their late teens and early 20s. Gelowicz, the group's ringleader, grew up in a normal middle-class family in largely Roman Catholic Bavaria, where he learned about violence and extremism from a hate preacher.

The home-grown terrorists are well suited to strike randomly, as they carry EU passports that allow them to travel all over the European Union, often remain dressed in a Western style and speak accent-free German.

Terror plotting in Germany used to be confined to foreign residents.

In 2001, the German port city of Hamburg was a safe haven to Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In July 2006, two Lebanese men placed a pair of homemade bombs on two commuter trains near Cologne; the devices failed to detonate, and no one was injured.

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