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.
Earlier, police had shut the station for five hours. They said the move was linked to the investigation into two bombs that were discovered in abandoned suitcases on trains in Dortmund and Koblenz last month.
Police said on Friday they were looking for two male suspects who were caught on video boarding the trains with the suitcases in Cologne. The footage of the two men was put on the Internet to help the manhunt. Police have said the bombs may have been part of a plot designed to show anger over the Middle East crisis.
The bombs were fitted with timers set to go off 10 minutes before the trains arrived in the two cities. The explosives had been ignited but failed to detonate.
IIUC, police found material in arabic in the suitcases, including phone numbers.
The prosecutorÂ’s office said the suspect would be brought before a federal judge investigating the bomb plot on Sunday.
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German authorities on Saturday arrested a Lebanese student suspected of helping plant two bombs that failed to explode on trains last month, officials said. The 21-year-old was detained a day after investigators released surveillance camera footage from July 31, the day of the attempted bombing, showing two men with heavy luggage who were believed to have planted the devices. The man was arrested early Saturday morning at the main station in the Baltic Sea port city of Kiel, where he lived and studied. Chief prosecutor Monika Harms said he apparently had planned to flee the country, but she did not say where he wanted to go.
Prosecutors said the suspect was identified with the help of the surveillance footage, from Cologne station, and DNA traces from one of the suitcases in which the bombs were found. Joerg Ziercke, the head of Germany's Federal Crime Office, told reporters in Kiel he was confident that "we caught the right suspected bomb planter here in Kiel today."