Court jails four Islamists for failed bomb plot in Germany (Roundup)

Mar 4, 2010, 13:48 GMT

Dusseldorf - Two German converts to Islam were jailed Thursday for 12 years each for leading an Islamist conspiracy by four men aimed at blowing up US army bases.

Police arrested the four plotters in September 2007 and seized nearly a ton of materials to make bombs before the group could act.

The four admitted association with a group called the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), an affiliate of al-Qaeda, during a 10-month trial in a heavily guarded courthouse in Dusseldorf.

Fritz Gelowicz, 31, and Daniel Schneider, 24, both Germans who were brought up as Christians but converted to Islam, were given 12 years, avoiding a maximum 15-year term because they gave detailed evidence about the IJU.

A third man who was arrested with them in a quiet village in the Sauerland hills, Turkish national Adem Yilmaz, 31, was given 11 years.

The three were convicted of membership in a terrorist group, conspiracy to commit multiple murders and plotting a crime using explosives.

A helper, Turkish-born Atilla Selek, 25, who was arrested later in Turkey, was jailed for five years for supporting a terrorist group, but is expected to be free in five months. All the terms can be reduced through parole and by counting pre-trial custody.

The group discussed car-bomb targets as diverse as US bases, bars, supermarkets and airports in various German cities before they were arrested, but apparently had not yet fixed on a precise target.

'An attack on such a scale has never happened in Germany. There was never even a plot before this to mount such a vast attack,' said presiding judge Ottmar Breidling. 'A terrible plan of attack was foiled.'

The plotters' 'hatred of infidels' and a mix of 'delusion and bizarre ideas' had inspired them to plot a 'second September 11,' he said, referring to attacks in 2001 on New York and Washington.

The arrests, just two years after four British Muslims killed 52 people in the London train suicide bombings, marked Germany's first encounter with a 'home-grown' Islamist plot, shaking the belief that Islamic radicalism is only found in poor, non-western societies.

Breidling said, 'This trial showed that even young people from a western society may be willing to sacrifice their lives for Islamic terrorism, despite having only a shallow knowledge of Islam.'

The court heard that the two converts were both children of broken marriages.

'Violent Islamism evidently has a fatal attraction even to people in our society if families do not give adequate attention to their children and offer them answers to questions about the essence of life,' the judge said.

The trio stockpiled more than 700 litres of hydrogen peroxide, but the trial heard their planned car-bombs would probably not have worked. Police surreptitiously diluted most of the chemical, while 23 of the 26 detonators the plotters bought were faulty.

The men hoped the attacks would force Germany to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Elite police surprised them in a rented home.

Selek obtained the detonators the group wanted, but refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the IJU, so he was not considered part of the cell and could not be convicted of IJU membership.

Schneider was additionally convicted of the attempted murder of a policeman who was trying to arrest him. Schneider snatched a pistol while they were struggling and pulled the trigger, but the policeman was not wounded.

Their organization, the IJU, began in Uzbekistan and has bases in the lawless Waziristan region of Pakistan. The men confirmed it is allied with al-Qaeda but the two do not interfere with one another, the accused told the state superior court during the trial.

Their lawyers had demanded sentences of about 10 years apiece for the main trio, arguing they were entitled to a larger rebate for the confessions, which offered intelligence agencies a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a terrorist organization.

But the court said it had 'no free gifts' for the accused, since it was only as a result of good police work that they were caught.

The main trio were additionally convicted of attempting to force the hand of a German constitutional body, a reference to their intent to influence the German government to change its Afghanistan policy.

Several of the defence lawyers said they would probably not appeal the sentences.