A LEBANESE student suspected of trying to paralyse the German railway network with a bomb concealed in a suitcase appeared in court yesterday, as a huge police hunt for a second suspect continued.

The 21-year-old man was remanded in custody by an investigating judge in Karlsruhe, southwest Germany, on charges of attempted murder, belonging to a terrorist organisation and attempting to cause an explosion.

The suspect was an engineering student in the north German town of Kiel, where he was held on Saturday morning.

His arrest has thrown the country into panic since it coincides with Berlin’s emotionally charged decision to deploy troops in the Middle East for the first time since the Second World War. Suddenly Germans, too, are beginning to feel that they have become a target.

“The terrorist threat has never before come so close to us,” Wolfgang Schäuble, the Interior Minister, said. Police patrols on railway stations have been stepped up but the scale of the problem — 5,700 railway stations and 4.3 million passengers a day — makes it impossible to impose the security measures being put in place in airports in Britain and elsewhere.

The suspect, identified only as Youssef Mohammed E, is accused of being at the heart of a plot to blow up two regional trains simultaneously on July 31. Investigators say that only a flaw in the construction of the propane gas bombs prevented a disaster.

There are parallels with the alleged London plot to blow up airliners and the Madrid train bombings. The plan, hatched in Germany, however, lacked the necessary sophistication. The propane gas was supposed to be detonated by an electronic device attached to alarm clocks in two suitcases. A mixture of petrol and oil in the same suitcases was intended to spread fire through the carriages. But the mechanism failed.

“The DNA samples on one case corresponded to the genetic characteristics of the suspect,” a police spokesman said. “There is also a fingerprint match.”

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