Prosecutor: German Islamists planned mass murder

Feb 3, 2010, 17:48 GMT

Dusseldorf - The chief prosecutor in the German trial of four alleged Islamists said on Wednesday that they had planned 'mass murder' on a scale unknown in Germany.

State prosecutor Volker Brinkmann said the members of the so- called Sauerland Group were driven by an overwhelming hatred of US soldiers and by a desire to carry out mass murder, and would not have shied away from killing innocent women and children.

The group, consisting of Daniel Schneider, Fritz Gelowicz, Adem Yilmaz and Attila Selek, is accused of planning attacks on US military bases in 2007.

The chief prosecutor emphatically warned against the 'cancer of Islamist terrorism,' as he set out his case to the Dusseldorf court. He argued that this 'cancer' would stop at nothing and chose its victims at random. Brinkmann said the four defendants had shown no real remorse during the nine-month trial, and said they did not confess out of regret.

'The accused wanted to buy themselves a reduced sentence by pleading to the charges. Even the most convinced holy warrior does not want to sit in prison and watch the jihad (holy war) pass by,' the prosecutor said.

Brinkmann said the four men, who confessed their allegiance to the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), were blinded by religious fervour and wanted to build explosives of unimaginable strength, many times more powerful than the bombs used in the 2005 Islamist attacks on London.

'The accused have damaged Islam. They have given new nourishment to the reservations held against the world's second largest religion,' the prosecutor continued, adding that few people shared their fundamentalist Wahabi views.

Brinkmann said the trial was unusual in many ways, not least the sheer volume of evidence contained in 530 folders and 2,600 court exhibits. If the 3.6 terabytes of material were printed out, they would dwarf the courthouse.

Public prosecutor Cornelia Zacharias said the IJU had sent the defendants to Germany, because there they could 'use less effort to inflict greater damage' on the Americans than in the Afghan-Pakistani combat zone.

Three members of the group were apprehended in 2007 by German special forces after long surveillance, as they were preparing some 730 litres of hydrogen peroxide liquid explosives. The fourth member was later arrested in Turkey.

The prosecution is to argue its case for a second day, when they are to announce their plea for sentencing. A verdict is expected on March 4.