RIO DE JANEIRO — The Brazilian authorities arrested 10 members of an Islamist militant group that was organizing terrorist attacks, officials announced Thursday, raising tension around the country just two weeks before the start of the Olympic Games.
The Federal Police said in a statement that the suspects belonged to a group called the Defenders of Sharia. Agents from an antiterrorism unit are investigating the group’s activities in several states, including Rio de Janeiro, where the Games will take place.
The arrests were announced at a time when the Brazilian authorities are coming under scrutiny over security preparations for the Olympics. Responding to the truck massacre last week in Nice, France, Brazil’s sports minister, Leonardo Picciani, told reporters on Wednesday that “the government is absolutely convinced that the Games will be safe.”
Brazil’s justice minister, Alexandre de Moraes, said Thursday that Brazil’s main intelligence agency, known as ABIN, was working with foreign intelligence services and the Federal Police, an investigative force in Brazil that is similar to the F.B.I.
Officials said that the people arrested had communicated with one another via WhatsApp and Telegram, two mobile messaging services. Mr. Moraes said the suspects had been taken into custody “when they went from basic commentaries about the Islamic State to preparatory acts.”
Still, Mr. Moraes emphasized the group’s embryonic nature, calling it “an amateur cell without any preparation.” He said that its members had been seeking to buy weapons in Paraguay, including an AK-47 rifle, but that no such arms acquisitions were confirmed.
“This is a disorganized cell,” Mr. Moraes said, who described all those arrested as Brazilian citizens. He said that intercepted messages showed members of the group celebrating the recent attacks in Orlando, Fla., and Nice.
Mr. Moraes did not provide more details about what kind of attack the group was planning, but he said officials had to act “because of the proximity of the Olympics.”
Marcos Josegrei da Silva, the federal judge overseeing the case, said on Thursday that the suspects ranged in age from 20 to 40, and that they communicated with each other using code names in Arabic even though none appeared to have Arab ancestry.
“It’s hard to call them terrorists,” Judge da Silva said. “But even though they don’t have a very solid organization, the arrests are warranted from a legal point of view.”
One suspect, identified in Brazilian media reports as Vitor Barbosa Magalhães, 23, converted to Islam several years ago and lived in the city of Guarulhos in São Paulo State’s metropolitan area, where he works in his father’s car repair shop.
Mr. Magalhães’s wife told reporters he had traveled to Egypt in 2012 to study Arabic and Islam. After returning to Brazil, he gave classes in Arabic over YouTube and maintained a WhatsApp group to discuss Islam, she said.
Concern has been increasing here over the potential for terrorist attacks around the Olympics, with police bomb-detonation squads responding to various reports of bags left in public areas (no explosive devices have been found). These fears are relatively new in Brazil, a country that has largely been spared the kind of large-scale attacks that have horrified Europe, the Middle East, the United States and many other parts of the world.
Brazilian officials have also said they were enhancing security measures following a report by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist websites, saying that a group calling itself Ansar al-Khilafah Brazil had proclaimed allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State.
The arrests on Thursday marked a turning point in the way Brazil’s government generally discusses terrorism threats. For more than a decade, and especially after the Sept. 11 attacks, Brazilian intelligence officials have been monitoring individuals suspected of links to terrorism.
During that time, however, “Brazilian government officials kept saying publicly that no credible evidence exists that people who live inside Brazil have links to terrorism,” said Marcos Ferreira, a scholar focusing on terrorism in South America at the Federal University of Paraíba.
At the same time, other experts voiced caution as to whether the suspects would have put a plot into motion.
“Initially, these arrests seem very fragile,” said Rodrigo Monteiro, a security specialist at the Federal Fluminense University in Rio. “We need to wait a bit for the government to define the threat in a better way.”
On Thursday, the justice minister, Mr. Moraes, said that violent crime remained the priority ahead of the Olympics. Despite gun control measures, Rio is still awash in weapons, with drug gangs wielding control over parts of the city. The authorities have begun deploying tens of thousands of troops to bolster security in Rio.
“The biggest concern is still crime,” Mr. Moraes said.
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