In Suspect Denies Ties to German Bomb Plot, Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish report in the New York Times, dated 12 October, report on the case of a young GermanT man of Turkish extraction who

Atilla Selek, a young German man with Turkish parents, stands at the heart of the investigation here into the reports of a terrorist plot that shocked this nation last month. He is in Turkey, a free man for now, though he says he is under constant surveillance.

Intelligence officials say that Mr. Selek, 22, trained at a terrorist camp in Pakistan and was part of the inner circle of plotters, including the three who were arrested last month and accused of planning what the authorities say would have been a series of deadly bombings. Mr. Selek vehemently denies the accusations.

– snip –

This stood out:

German investigators are working to build a case against the three men under arrest and seven other people they say were associates in the suspected plot, which increasingly appears to have a Turkish connection. In the German federal court in Karlsruhe last week, a 15-year-old German boy of Tunisian descent testified that he had unwittingly carried the detonators from Istanbul to Germany, a security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing a closed-door hearing.

The German magazine Spiegel reported that the boy had carried a package that included a pair of shoes and that the detonators had been hidden inside the soles of the shoes, to Fritz Gelowicz, one of the men in custody and a friend of Mr. Selek in Ulm. They attended the same religious centers, the Multi-Kultur-Haus and the Islamic Information Center, both of which German authorities say were sources of extreme Islamist teaching. The Multi-Kultur-Haus was closed by state authorities in December 2005.

If accurate, this group – or “cell” – didn’t have the sophistication to manage detonation by themselves. Detonation doesn’t necessarily call for sophisticated technology:

The explosive train, also called an initiation sequence or firing train, is the sequence of charges that progresses from relatively low levels of energy to initiate the final explosive material or main charge. There are low- and high-explosive trains. Low-explosive trains are as simple as a rifle cartridge, including a primer and a propellant charge. High-explosives trains can be more complex, either two-step (e.g., detonator and dynamite) or three-step (e.g., detonator, booster of primary explosive, and main charge of secondary explosive). Detonators are often made from tetryl and fulminates.  Source .

It’s not, in my view, bad news.