Departing from the central station in Cologne, the bombs were timed to go off near Hamm or Dortmund and near Koblenz, and according to German investigators "would have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people ... on a much larger scale than the terrorist attacks on London subways and buses in July 2005.

[4] Jihad Hamad, who had fled to Lebanon after the attempted attacks was sentenced to twelve years in prison in Beirut in 2007.

[5] Youssef Mohamad el-Hajdib, arrested in Kiel on 19 August, was in 2008 sentenced to life in prison in Germany for the attempted bombings.

[6] There remained suspicions of involvement by the brother of one of the convicted men, Saddam el-Hajdib, a high-ranking member of Fatah al-Islam who was killed in fighting with the Lebanese Army before he could be tried in court.

There were reports two weeks later in connection with the Vollsmose terrorist trial that he was trying to travel to Denmark and that he had Odense imam Abu Bashar's telephone in his pocket.

[1] Hamad told Lebanese interrogators that El Hajdib saw the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy as an attack by the Western world on Islam.

[11] Further motivation was the killing of Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on 7 June 2006 by US forces.