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The Week in Germany: Current Affairs August 25, 2006 Second Suspect in German Train Bomb Attempt Apprehended in Lebanon The arrest of two Lebanese men accused of planting bombs on German trains that failed to detonate has instilled a renewed sense of urgency on tackling terrorism in a nation hitherto regarded as a less likely target than the United States or Britain. The botched attacks and subsequent hunt for the two suspects have also stoked political debate on how far Germany should go in shoring up its existing security measures and introducing new ones - sensitive topics in a country that prides itself on upholding the right to privacy in view of its darker historical chapters. Youssef Mohamad E.H., 21, was arrested by police acting on a tip-off from Lebanese authorities in the northern German city of Kiel on August 19. His alleged accomplice Jihad Hamad, 20, surrendered to police in Tripoli in northern Lebanon on August 24 and was taken to Beirut. The German government said it would seek his extradition on charges of terrorism and attempting to blow up two trains, and immediately dispatched officials to Lebanon to this end. The first suspect was meanwhile being interrogated by German federal police from a Berlin jail. Both men stand accused of planting bombs discovered aboard two trains and timed to explode just before reaching the western German cities of Koblenz and Dortmund on July 31. Yet the two bombs, contained in suitcases, failed to blow up due to flaws in their constructions, and the suspicious suitcases were removed from the trains in the two cities. Before they put the suitcases aboard the trains, the two suspects were captured on film by security cameras at the busy Cologne train station. The incident was Germany's closest shave yet with international terrorism.
A wider network of terrorists must have been involved Rainer Griesbaum, a prosecutor in the German justice capital of Karlsruhe, home to the nation's highest court, said flammable material, receipts for gas canisters, wires and black self-adhesive tape found in Hamad's hastily abandoned Cologne apartment appeared to be linked to the two bombs, German news agency dpa reported on August 24. Griesbaum moreover indicated that a wider network of plotters was being sought. A false sense of security is no longer possible "The threat was never this close," Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble told mass-circulation daily Bild. "It was a deceptive peace. Islamic terrorism is not leaving our country out."Bild wondered in an August 21 interview with Schäuble about a federal figure of 32,100 radical Islamists presently presumed in Germany. But the interior minister pointed out that a far lower figure of some 200 to 300 people are considered as potential terrorists by the German government, including so-called "sleepers" connected to the Al Quaida network held responsible for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Schäuble is due to meet with interior ministers from Germany's 16 states for a special conference in Berlin on September 4 to discuss beefing up security measures, according to dpa. The interior minister met with his counterparts from Austria, Switzerland and tiny Liechtenstein in that country's capital, Vaduz, on August 24 for talks on closer cooperation among the four largely German-speaking countries on battling cross-border crime and enhancing security measures for both air and rail travel. Are rail marshals the wave of the future? Germany intends to set up an anti-terror database and is considering deploying armed rail marshals on trains. But the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD), the nation's two main political parties and rivals now governing the country together in an unusual political constellation called a "grand coalition", are still debating how much information police, secret services and judicial systems should be allowed to access via the database. CDU legal expert Clemens Binninger is meanwhile among those calling for increased police presence at train stations and in trains. "We need to consider having armed train personnel - so-called rail marshals, comparable to the sky marshals on many flights," he is quoted as saying by Bild. But the Bund Deutscher Kriminalbeamten (BDK), a federation of security
officials, has dismissed this idea. Train personnel could keep an eye
on mysterious suitcases just as well as armed guards, the BDK has claimed. Links:
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