DUESSELDORF (Germany) - A LEBANESE man was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday for a failed bid to blow up German passenger trains that investigators say would have triggered a bloodbath had the bombs gone off.

The regional superior court in this western city convicted Yusef Mohammed al-Hajj Dib, 24, of multiple counts of attempted murder for his part in an attempt to attack two regional trains packed with travellers in July 2006.

Presiding judge Ottmar Breidling said Dib was guilty of a 'thoroughly terrorist act' and dismissed his claim that he had only deposited a mock-up of a bomb packed in a suitcase in a rail carriage to scare the German public.

'This was a crime for which only the highest penalty under the law can apply,' Mr Breidling said.

Dib had told the court during his year-long trial that he only intended to frighten Germans in revenge for the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in Europe, which sparked protests by Muslims around the world.

Men identified by police as Dib and a Lebanese associate, Jihad Hamad, were captured on security cameras placing suitcases packed with homemade explosives on two trains carrying 280 people on July 31, 2006.

The images ran in heavy rotation on national television as the country digested how close it had come to the first Islamist attack on German soil following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States which were planned in part in the German port city of Hamburg.

'Germany was never closer to an Islamist attack,' state prosecutor Duscha Gmel said.

Prosecutors argued that the explosions could have killed up to 75 people, saying only a technical fault prevented a massacre in a plot allegedly modelled on the deadly train blasts in Madrid in 2004 and London the following year.

The attempted bombings came just weeks after the World Cup football championship in Germany during which hundreds of thousands of fans from around the world descended on the country.

Both Dib and Hamad, who is currently serving a 12-year sentence in Beirut over the plot, had been living as students in Germany. -- AFP