German police focus on far-right link to railway bombing

DUSSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) -- German police focused on far-right groups on Saturday in an investigation into a railway station bomb attack that injured six Jews and three of their relatives.

The blast in a Dusseldorf station on Thursday and suspicion that it was a racist attack have shocked a country sensitive to its Nazi past.

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"We are primarily looking at racism and anti-Semitism as the motive," state prosecutor Johannes Mocken told Reuters. He said there were no firm leads as yet.

Investigators were pinning their hopes on an examination of debris which might reveal how the splinter bomb was detonated, but results could not be expected until next week, Mocken said.

The nine -- who came from Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Russia -- walked as a group from the station to a German class and back at the same times every weekday, making them a potential target for a remote control device.

"This heinous crime has to be battled with all our available means," said Interior Minister Otto Schily late on Friday. "It can be assumed that this was a racially motivated crime."

Schily called crisis talks for next week to agree tougher measures against far-right crime and rejected accusations that the government was doing too little to prevent racist violence.

Police said four of the nine were badly injured in the blast including a pregnant 26-year-old identified as Tatyana L., whose unborn child died when metal splinters pierced her abdomen.

Doctors said her life was no longer in danger after a four-hour operation to save her leg, which had been almost severed by the bomb. Her 28-year-old husband, Michael, was also badly injured and his condition was still critical after deteriorating on Friday.

"The motive of the brutal attack is still in the dark, but the fact that the terror was aimed at a group of mostly Jewish immigrants makes us fear the worst," wrote Die Welt, a leading conservative daily, in a page one editorial on Saturday.

The paper said that there had been so many recent far-right attacks on foreigners, blacks, homeless people, synagogues and even German youths protesting against racism that the crimes were no longer being taken seriously enough.

"We have grown accustomed to this as if it were something normal," Die Welt said. "And that will open the gates for the far-right mob... When even foreign diplomats in Berlin dare not go into some districts it is high time for action."

Just two days before the blast, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said he was fed up with the growing number of racist attacks and called xenophobia a serious threat to domestic security as well as Germany's foreign image.

The Nazis slaughtered more than six million Jews during the Holocaust, part of Adolf Hitler's plan to eradicate world Jewry that also wiped out Germany's once-vibrant Jewish community.

Little more than half a century after the Holocaust, Germany is home to the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world, swollen by some 60,000 newcomers from eastern Europe and Russia granted special entry permits and resettlement subsidies.

The immigrants injured in the bomb blast were recent arrivals in a Dusseldorf Jewish community numbering 6,300 which is dominated by former Soviet emigres.

"People who would kill a man because he is black, or throw firebombs at children because they are foreigners are also capable of bombing Jews," said the Hanover Neue Presse daily.

"If it turns out the bomb was placed by the right-wing, then that was just an appetizer to what is spreading underneath us."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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