- guardian.co.uk, Saturday July 29 2000 01.10 BST
It emerged that all nine casualties were immigrants, six of whom were Jews; the other three victims were related by marriage to the six.
Germany's interior minister, Otto Schily, said it was reasonable to suspect that the attack was a racist one. "One can suspect that it could have such a background," he said.
The bombing will cause deep concern within the German government - only last month ministers received a warning from the security services that the far right was developing "terrorist" structures.
The attack will also spread dismay among the tens of thousands of Jews who hope to enter Germany under a scheme which accords them preferential treatment over other immigrants. In recent years, some 60,000 Jews have flocked to Germany from eastern Europe and Russia, lured by special entry permits and resettlement facilities.
The victims came from Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. They had just left a daily German-language class paid for by the government and were on their way to catch a train to the nearby town of Solingen when they were caught by the blast. The bomb, packed with shrapnel, had been placed on a footbridge leading to the station.
A spokesman for the prosecutor's office in Düsseldorf said: "We can't rule out any motive, including an anti-foreigner motive."
Police experts were yesterday trying to reconstruct the explosive device to establish whether it was detonated remotely or by means of a timer. This is crucial to gauge whether the victims were the intended targets: a timed explosion would be less discriminate than a remotely detonated one.
"We can't rule out that someone placed this bomb to hit this group or one member of it - or it could be simple coincidence," the prosecutor's spokesman said.
A reward of DM10,000 (£3,150) has been offered for information leading to the arrest of the bombers.
A 26-year-old woman lost her unborn child when shrapnel tore into her belly. She was five months pregnant. However, doctors at the Düsseldorf's university hospital managed to reattach her leg, which was almost severed by the explosion.
The woman's husband, a 28-year-old economist, was the most seriously injured of the victims. He received wounds to the abdomen and was last night still on the critical list.
Michael Szentei-Heife, the director of the Jewish community in Düsseldorf, said the couple had arrived in Germany last November from Simferopol in central Ukraine. The other victims - five women and two men - suffered shrapnel wounds.
Jewish leaders were careful, however, not to predict the outcome of police inquiries.
"We are horrified by this attack on innocent people," said Paul Spiegel, the head of Germany's Jewish community. But he said he did not want to comment further until more was known about the reasons for the bombing.
Mr Szentei-Heife said it would be difficult to show that anti-semitism, rather than xenophobia, lay behind the maiming of the victims. "The fact that six out of nine are Jewish puts that into your mind. But, on the other hand, they were not recognisable as Jews," he said.
Large numbers of eastern Europeans have arrived in Germany since the collapse of communism. But the hostility towards them has been most pronounced in the formerly communist east of the country, where unemployment is high and the presence of cheap labour is deeply resented.
Düsseldorf, by contrast, is one of the most prosperous cities in the west.
"We are shocked that this could occur in Düsseldorf, a place where these things so far have seemed impossible," Mr Szentei-Heife said. "We are not in the east, the south or the north, where xenophobia is stronger than in the Rhineland, so the shock is that much greater."
