Christians Under Attack

Two suitcase bombs discovered early this week in western German train stations may be traceable to the Middle East according to Friday reports. Both bombs -- packed in abandoned pieces of luggage and left on separate trains -- were found by officials in lost-and-found centers on Monday and Tuesday. One package allegedly contained a plastic bag printed with Arabic writing. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the bag came from the Lebanese capital of Beirut, but German officials wouldn't confirm the story. "We don't give out details on the results of an ongoing investigation," said Ullrich Schultheis, a spokesman for the German Attorney General's office in Karlsruhe.

 

Railway officials found one suitcase on Monday aboard a regional train in northwestern Germany and unpacked it at the lost-and-found office of the Dortmund station. The other was found Sunday on a train between Mönchengladbach and Koblenz, and unpacked Tuesday at the Koblenz station. The gas-canister bombs in both cases were professionally-built, according to Jürgen Kleis, head of the team of detectives on the case; other sources added that they were filled with too much gas to explode.

What isn't clear is how to interpret the plastic bag. Terrorists who want to claim responsibility tend to leave unmistakable clues, say experts, and the bag would have been destroyed in any explosion. The perpetrators may have wanted to leave a false trail to the Middle East, and investigators say they're working on every scenario -- from terrorism to the possibility that someone wanted to blackmail the German rail system.

Does Germany need tighter security?

Discovery of the bombs this week sparked a nationwide political squabble over security measures on German trains. Politicians from the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) like Albrecht Buttolo, Interior Minister in the eastern state of Saxony, called for more video cameras. "Video surveillance and videotaping should be expanded in train stations as well as in trains," he said. "We should also look into video surveillance on trams and subway trains." He said another suitcase bomb found unexploded in 2003 at a train station in Dresden -- though ultimately not connected with international terrorism -- showed how vulnerable Germany is.

Peter Schaar, Germany's Federal Data Protection Commissioner, said large stations like those in Koblenz and Dortmund already had video cameras. "Expanding cameras to all areas -- into public toilets, for example -- would be alarming on constitutional grounds," he said, according to Die Welt. A prominent Green Party parliamentarian, Hans-Christian Ströbele, said, "It's been proven for a long time that video surveillance of public spaces doesn't eliminate danger."

 

Deutsche Bahn officials said a regime for scanning every piece of luggage carried by its passengers onto German trains would be impractical. They pointed out that the rail system carries as many people in three days as Lufthansa airlines serves in a year. About 4.3 million people ride 30,000 trains in Germany every day, according to Reuters.

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