2 terrorist suspects arrested on KLM flight

German police commandos grabbed two terrorist suspects from an Amsterdam-bound flight early Friday before the plane took off from Cologne, police said.

North Rhine-Westphalia state police identified the suspected Islamist militants, on a KLM aircraft about to take off from Cologne airport for Amsterdam, as a 23-year-old Somali and a 24-year-old German born in Somalia's capital Mogadishu.

"The police did not storm the plane," spokesman Frank Scheulen said. "It all went off in quite an unspectacular manner."

No further details were immediately available from the police but Der Spiegel magazine website said police did not suspect the men were intending to hijack the plane.

A KLM spokeswoman said on NOS news in the Netherlands that police boarded the plane when it was at its "point of departure" and grabbed the two suspects.

Everyone was then forced to leave the plane, and there was a "baggage parade" to see whose bags belonged to whom, she said.

Germany's top-selling Bild newspaper, citing police sources, said the two had been under observation for months and a suicide note was found in their apartment saying that they wanted to die for the "Jihad" or "Holy war."

The flight, KL1804, continued its journey to Amsterdam just over an hour later and has since landed in Amsterdam.

The arrests appear to be unrelated to a search for two suspected Islamist militants which the Federal Crime Office had announced on Thursday.

The Office had said they believed the two men, one German and one born in Lebanon, might be heading to Germany. They had previously thought they were in Afghanistan.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report