Their arrival came as a suicide bombing on board a bus close to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's official residence in Jerusalem left at least 10 dead and 40 others wounded. An Israeli official told AFP that the swap would go ahead regardless. A German military plane flew in from Beirut with the bodies of three Israeli soldiers and reserve colonel Elhanan Tannenbaum to the military part of Cologne-Wahn airport at about 6:55 am (0555 GMT), an AFP/DDP photographer said.

The Airbus 310 was immediately taken to a hangar.

An Israeli aircraft carrying around 30 Arab prisoners and a German national, who all boarded in Tel Aviv overnight, touched down minutes later at the airport, whose main approach road was blocked by German military police.

The government here was refusing all comment early Thursday on what has so far been an intricate operation, and is the culmination of years of behind-the-scenes mediation by German officials.

A team of Israeli experts who arrived in Germany on Wednesday was to begin identifying the soldiers' bodies, a process which was expected to take up most of Thursday morning.

A few hours after the aircraft left the Middle East, two buses carrying the first batch of some 400 Palestinian prisoners who are also to go free in the deal left an Israeli prison headed for the border with the northern West Bank.

Until Israel is assured that the Lebanese-based Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah has complied with its terms of the prisoner swap, all the detainees will remain under Israeli control, an Israeli army spokesman said earlier.

Just hours before handing over the bodies, Hezbollah confirmed for the first time that the three Israeli soldiers -- Adi Avitan, Benyamin Avraham and Omar Sawaid -- were indeed dead; a fact widely presumed for some time.

The Arab prisoners, 23 Lebanese and five Syrians, and the German, were released from Israel's Rimonim prison, north of Tel Aviv, aboard a bus whose windows were blacked out and were escorted by special police units, an AFP correspondent said.

The most prominent among the Lebanese, some held for more than a decade, are Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid Obeid and another fundamentalist leader, Mustafa Dirani, who were kidnapped by Israeli forces in 1989 and 1994 respectively.

The Palestinian prisoners, who had been grouped together at the Ketziot detention center in the southern Negev desert, were expected to leave on buses and head to checkpoints between Israel and the occupied territories throughout the morning.

The first two buses were thought to be heading to the Salam checkpoint on the border between the West Bank and Israel.