A window of Dortmund's team bus is damaged after an explosion before the Champions League quarterfinal soccer match between Borussia Dortmund and AS Monaco in Dortmund, Germany, April 11. (Martin Meissner/AP)

German police arrested a suspect Friday in the attack on a popular soccer team and described the bombing as motivated by greed rather than extremism.

A special police unit near the southern city of Tübingen arrested a Russian-German national identified as Sergei W. A statement from the federal public prosecutor said he carried out the attack on the Borussia Dortmund club in hopes of lowering its stock value.

The suspect is accused of planting three bombs last week packed with metal pins near the hotel where the team was staying and detonating them as the bus left for a match against AS Monaco.

Defender Marc Bartra was wounded and had to undergo surgery. A police officer, escorting the bus on a motorcycle, suffered blast trauma.

Frauke Köhler, spokeswoman for the federal public prosecutor, said the 28-year-old suspect faces charges including attempted murder and setting off an explosion.

Police cars sit in front of a house where the suspect in the attack on a German soccer team was arrested in Rottenburg on April 21. (Oskar Eyb/European Pressphoto Agency)

She did not rule out possible accomplices, but there are no indications that others were involved.

According to the statement, Sergei W bought 15,000 so-called put options — financial instruments which would have allowed him to make significant gains if the team’s stock price had tumbled — the day of the attack.

The purchase was made online from the team’s hotel. Days before the blast, the suspect moved into a room with a view of the area where he would later plant the bombs.

Borussia Dortmund stock value had temporarily declined slightly after the attack and more significantly after the team was eliminated from the Champions League tournament earlier this week, but has risen again since.

Investigators had previously focused on a radical Islamist motivation for the attack because of letters found at the scene claiming responsibility and referring to the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. But there always were doubts about the authenticity of the documents.

Other statements had surfaced which suggested right-wing and left-wing extremist motives. According to authorities, however, there’s no indication that these were authored by the perpetrator of the attack.

“The fact that here, if the accusation is true, somebody wanted to enrich himself by manipulating stock prices by killing people is a particularly despicable kind of greed,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière told reporters.

Ralf Jäger, interior minister of the western German state of North-Rhine Westphalia, where the attack took place, said that more severe injuries and even deaths could have occurred if the bombs had been planted at a slightly different height and detonated one or two seconds earlier.

He said the suspect had bomb-building knowledge because of his professional background, but gave no further details.

Read more:

Investigators doubt ‘Islamist extremists’ behind Dortmund soccer bus blast

German investigators say letters suggest Islamist links to soccer bus blasts

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news