German bomb attempt: Revenge for brother killed in Lebanon?

posted at 9:46 pm on August 21, 2006 by Allahpundit
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Just following up. German officials are investigating whether the suspect they have in custody is part of a network or was working in tandem with one other guy. Jeff Kouba of Security Watchtower thinks AQ might be working its way through a blacklist of U.S. allies. It’s an intriguing theory, but Stratfor says the evidence suggests this wasn’t an organized attack at all. It was, in fact, amateur hour:

[T]he relatively simplicity of the [bombs] in this case tends to rule out al Qaeda, which prefers complex plots like those seen in the London and Madrid commuter train attacks. The simple nature of the devices indicates that Hezbollah, which has never had problems manufacturing effective IEDs or obtaining explosives in Europe and elsewhere, probably was not involved in the plot either.

The case does demonstrate the continuing militant attraction to this kind of soft target.

If not organized terror, then why? Spiegel has its ear to the ground:

The Lebanese student prayed up to five times a day, visiting a prayer room that was set up in the basement of the student block. On the door there is a sign banning cellphones and a poster in which the Imam Ali mosque can be spotted in a pretty view of Hamburg’s Uhlenhorst district. According to findings by the Hamburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution, this Islamic center is a meeting place for Shia supporters of Hezbollah. However, Imane says that Youssef is a Sunni…

[T]he Hezbollah reference doesn’t seem to be all that absurd. The word in the student residence is that Youssef told other Muslims that his brother was killed three or four weeks ago during the Israeli military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But Imane wonders why he would look for revenge in Germany rather than against Israel.

Convenience? One kufr’s as good as another. Or maybe he was responding to the prospect of German peacekeepers being sent to Lebanon to help disarm Hezbollah. The bombs were planted on July 31; five days earlier, the national debate was burning sufficiently hot to warrant an article from the BBC.

Germany’s weighing now whether to ramp up security, leading to the usual creepy, embarrassing “is this the first step back to Nazism?” debate they have there every time the government does something the least bit assertive.

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