German rail attack may have been targeted at foreigners

Police investigating Thursday's bomb attack on a busy Dusseldorf train station said yesterday that the attack might have been motivated by anti-foreigner sentiment.

The nine victims, six of them Jewish, are all from former Soviet Union countries and were on their way home from a German language class in the city when the bomb went off.

Mr Johannes Mocken, spokesman for the state prosecutor in North Rhine-Westphalia, said that investigators were not sure whether the attack was motivated by xenophobia or whether the ethnic and religious origin of the victims was just a coincidence.

"We can't rule out any motive, including an anti-foreigner motive," he said at a news conference yesterday.

Four of the victims were badly injured in the attack, among them a young couple from Ukraine. The 20-year-old woman, identified only as Tatyana L, was pregnant at the time of the attack but lost her baby after splinters from the bomb pierced her stomach.

One of her legs was also nearly blown off in the explosion but was reattached by surgeons after a four-hour operation. Her 28-year-old husband was also in a critical condition after the attack, but both are now out of danger.

The other victims of the bomb suffered serious but less severe injuries from shrapnel.

Investigators are still trying to reconstruct the device to determine how it was detonated to give a better insight into the intent of the bomber. A remote control device would suggest the group of foreigners had been deliberately targeted, while a timer device would suggest more indiscriminate intent.

Prosecutors have offered a DM10,000 reward to anyone with relevant information about the bomb attack.

The fact that six of the victims were Jewish was played down yesterday by Mr Paul Spiegel, the president of the Jewish Council in Germany.

"The Jewish community is saddened that the majority of the victims were members of our community, but this was an attack on people, regardless of religious belief," he said.

Mr Michael Szentei-Heise, head of the 6,000-strong Jewish community in Dusseldorf, yesterday said he was shocked at the attack. "We are not in the east, the south or the north, where xenophobia is stronger than in the Rhineland," he said. The spectre of an upsurge in extreme-right action in Germany has once again made the issue a political football.

The Green party leader, Ms Renate Kunast, yesterday accused her partners in government, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), of hesitant action against extreme-right activity.

Ms Kunast reproached the SPD for its "hesitant action" against "groups which are a public danger", saying that such hesitancy was damaging Germany.

Her criticisms were followed by an announcement from the Minister for the Interior and SPD member, Mr Otto Schily, that he was personally taking responsibility for co-ordinating government programmes aimed at combating extreme-right violence.

While the total number of extreme-right attacks in Germany is falling, the attacks that do occur should not be played down, he said yesterday in Berlin.

His announcement came after police in north-east Germany confirmed the arrest of three teenagers in a suspected neo-Nazi attack, in which a homeless man of 51 was kicked to death. A fourth person - with the words "white power" tattooed on his skull - is on the run.