Lebanese student on trial for failed suitcase bombing in Germany

Dec 18, 2007, 8:37 GMT

Dusseldorf - Queues formed Tuesday outside a high-security court in the German city of Dusseldorf as a Lebanese student went on trial for attempting to detonate bombs on passenger trains that would have caused devastation comparable with similar attacks in Madrid and London.

There were long delays for those entering the court, as police and court officials conducted searches, ordering some to remove their shoes and other items of clothing.

In Beirut, an alleged co-conspirator was scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday at the end of a lengthy trial for the same offence.

The two men allegedly built the bombs using designs they found on the internet, hid them in suitcases and went together to Cologne station in the west of Germany on July 31 last year.

They took trains in opposite directions, left the bombs on board and left the country. Neither bomb exploded, and police say the two Lebanese assembled the devices wrongly.

The defence argues that Youssef Mohamad al-H, 23, made a deliberate mistake. This is contested by the prosecution, which argues that the bombs' construction points to an intent to cause death and serious injury through burns.

Al-H is accused of multiple attempted murders, but not of terrorist conspiracy, as German law requires at least three conspirators.

Earlier allegations that a shadowy Islamist terrorist group commissioned the attack have not shown up in the indictment. Prosecutors accept it is possible the pair were fanatical freelancers inspired by Islamist ideology.

Al-H is expected neither to admit to the charges nor to testify.

His alleged accomplice, Jihad Hamad, 22, was tried in Beirut along with three others because there is no treaty under which Lebanon could extradite him to Germany. He has appealed for mercy from the court and a mild sentence.

Ottmar Breidling, one of Germany's leading trial judges dealing with Islamist conspiracies, is presiding at the German trial, expected to continue in a fortress-like court in the city of Dusseldorf until well into 2008.

The Beirut findings will have little influence on the German court.

Prosecutors will lead evidence the two young Lebanese being educated in Germany were angry at the publication early in 2006 in Danish and German newspapers of cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed.

Commuter trains were bombed by Islamist extremists in Madrid in March 2004, claiming 191 lives. The London attacks in July the next year caused 52 deaths, apart from the four suicide bombers.