German plot suspect's laptop stored recipe for bomb

By Agence France Presse (AFP).

BERLIN: Bomb-building instructions have been found on the deleted hard drive of a computer belonging to one of the suspects in the attempted bombing last summer of two trains in Germany, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Investigators believe two of the Lebanese men arrested on suspicion of planting the bombs had used the instructions to build the devices, which failed to explode on two suburban trains on July 31 last year, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung said in an advance extract of its Thursday edition.

German police experts managed to retrieve the data from a deleted hard drive on a laptop which one of the suspects, Jihad Hamad, had taken with him on his return trip from Germany to Lebanon.

Hamad is due to go on trial with four other men in Lebanon on April 11, Lebanese authorities said this week.

The other main suspect in the case, Youssef Mohammed al-Hajj Dib, remains in custody in Germany.

German federal police said the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Western and some Arab media had been the catalyst for the bombing plot.

Investigators believe faulty detonators prevented the bombs from exploding.

Hamad had confessed earlier this week under judicial interrogation to planting one of the bombs, a Lebanese judicial source said. He had told Investigating Magistrate Michel Abou Arraj that he was trying to avenge the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, judicial reports added.

On Monday, police took the four suspects under heavy security from Roumieh prison to the Justice Palace in Beirut, where they underwent preliminary interrogation. - With AFP.