Lebanese man jailed for failed German bomb attacks

A Lebanese man was jailed for 12 years today for last year’s failed attempt to bomb German trains, judicial officials and the defence lawyer said.

Jihad Hamad was found guilty and sentenced to 12 years of hard labour by Beirut Criminal Court, the officials and defence lawyer Fawaz Zakariya said.

Three other defendants – Khaled Khair-Eddin el-Hajdib, Ayman Hawa and Khalil al-Boubou – were acquitted.

The four were charged with planting crude bombs on two trains at Cologne station on July 31, 2006. The bombs, found later, failed to explode because of faulty detonators.

The court also sentenced in his absence Youssef Mohammed el-Hajdib, who is being held and tried in Germany, to life in prison with hard labour, said Mr Zakariya and the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to the press.

El-Hajdib’s trial opened in the German city of Dusseldorf today.

Hamad had confessed to planting the bombs and said the aim was to protest against cartoons which ridiculed Islam’s prophet Mohammed. He denied any links to al-Qaida. The three others who were acquitted had denied involvement.

The four did not appear in court today when the ruling was made.

The drawings, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September 2005 and were re-published in other European papers, sparked outrage, protests and violence across the Muslim world, where many consider images of the prophet to be a blasphemy.