mn_germany_fra125.jpe

A man suspected of placing bombs on the trains on July 31 was captured on a surveillance camera. German Federal Crime Office photo via Associated Press

UPDATE: Scroll down to read the nationality of the suspect.

This MSNBC Reuters article is so careful in its reporting about the suspect arrested in the failed plot to explode bombs on German trains. It’s as if the reporter is typing with little fingers held aloft. So solicitous. Mustn’t alarm the German population of the terrorists in their midst.

BERLIN - German police have taken into custody a suspect linked to last month’s failed plot to explode bombs on German trains, the federal prosecutor’s office said on Saturday.

“The person appears to be one of the two suspects that have been sought since yesterday with the help of video footage that was made public,” the office said in a statement.

Police seized the suspect at the main train station in the northern city of Kiel.

When we were stationed in Germany we took trains all the time. We got tickets and got on the trains. There was no security whatsoever. After September 11th I quit taking the trains.

This Boston Globe article by Noah Barkin (still it’s Reuters) has some more detailed information including these juicy little tidbits……

Police have said the bombs — made with propane tanks, gasoline bottles and crude detonating devices — may have been part of a plot designed to show anger over the Middle East crisis.

Along with the bomb materials, they found a bag of starch with Arabic print and a shopping list in Arabic for olives, bread and Lebanese yoghurt.

Did the mediterranean looking men get home with the olives, bread and Lebanese yoghurt?

The writer notes that some in Germany may be waking up……..

It has been a wake-up call in a country where fears of terrorist attacks still rank well behind concerns over economic issues such as unemployment.

Germany has not suffered a major militant attack in recent years, although a cell including members of the group behind the September 11 attacks on the United States was based in the northern port city of Hamburg.

Dieter Wiefelspuetz, interior expert for the centre-left Social Democrat Party (SPD) in parliament, told German radio on Saturday that the bomb plot had shown that the threat of an attack in Germany had reached a new level.

“I had hoped that these were not real bombs, that it was simply a crazy person who wanted to scare the public,” he said. “But it is something much more serious. It is people who were very close to committing a horrible, deadly act.”

Spiegel Online has these chilling details…

Investigations by technical experts from Germany’s federal police have shown that the two bombs were to be detonated simultaneously, and that they were correctly wired and would in fact have exploded. “Their explosive force would have been so great that the explosion would have been on the same scale as the subway attacks in London in the summer of 2005,” a high-ranking security official told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The London attacks on three subways trains and a public bus took place on July 7, 2005 and left a toll of 52 dead and 700 injured.

This article from SFGate.com has a better description of the suspects and other important details…..

Surveillance video shows the two suspects in the Cologne train station. One has long black hair and wears a white shirt. He carries a hiker’s backpack around his shoulders and wheels a dark-colored suitcase behind him. The second man has close-cropped black hair and wears a German football jersey. He carries a satchel and pulls a large suitcase toward the train platform.

At some point, the two men disembarked from the trains, investigators said. Rail workers later discovered the abandoned luggage.

The bombs were cushioned in the suitcases by clothing and surrounded by gasoline bottles intended to spark a fireball when the propane tanks detonated. Police said the suitcases also contained a grocery list written in Arabic, at least one telephone number in Lebanon and bags of cornstarch manufactured in Lebanon and imported to a specialty food trader in Essen.

Still, investigators are hesitant to point toward the backgrounds of the suspects.

Investigators, however, would not elaborate on motives or whether the suspects had Muslim backgrounds.

UPDATE: The news media still cannot put Muslim and Terrorist in the same sentence……..

But they’ve now admitted that one of the suspects is Lebanese.

After wasting time searching for all the links to every nearly identical story earlier todayAllahpundit has posted about it and has something worth reading.