19 August 2006

KIEL, GERMANY - German police captured a 21-year-old Lebanese student just before dawn Saturday on suspicion of planting terrorist bombs three weeks ago on trains and said they were still looking for an accomplice.

Prosecutors gave the arrested man's first names as Youssef Mohammed, but withheld his surname. They said his DNA and fingerprints had been found on one of the two suitcases concealing the bombs. Neither exploded because of construction mistakes.

The wheeled suitcases, taken aboard trains on July 31 at Cologne in the west of the country, ended up in lost-and-found offices.

Anti-terrorist police said the arrested man had been put in a panic by Friday's nationwide publication of a series of security-camera colour images that showed him waiting on a platform, wearing a German football shirt with the number 13 on the back.

Prosecutor-General Monika Harms said he had been attempting to flee Kiel as a result. She added that the suspect would appear on Sunday in the southern city of Karlsruhe before a magistrate who could rule on his further detention.

Harms said investigators believed the two were part of a wider group.

"It is typified as a group of offenders with signs of a long-term structure," she said.

Joerg Ziercke, head of the BKA federal police, said panicking the suspect had been the calculated intention of investigators. The student of mechanical electronics was arrested waiting at the main railway station of Kiel, a Baltic port in the north of the country.

Police searched his bags, refuse containers and the station area for several hours, but found no explosives.

Television news reports said fellow residents of a Kiel hostel described the suspect as "very Islamic," but Ziercke said it was too early to state if he was an Islamist or had links to any international terrorist groups.

Detectives scoured the hostel in a leafy district of Kiel and police frogmen searched a nearby pond for possible evidence.

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