Top terrorist's wife tells German court: I raised the funds

Dec 22, 2010, 14:40 GMT

Berlin - The Muslim wife of a convicted terrorist kingpin admitted Wednesday to a German court that she raised funds for associates of al-Qaeda and posted Islamist videos on the internet.

Her convert-to-Islam husband, Fritz Gelowicz, is now serving 12 years for a foiled plot to set off a series of car bombs in Germany. The couple were fascinated by jihad or holy war against infidels.

Dressed in a black veil from head to toe, the wife, 29, whose parents immigrated to Germany from Turkey, told a Berlin court she had been convinced that funding the jihad was a way of standing up for orphans and poor Afghans suffering from the war.

'Yes, I wrote texts to publish on the internet and collected money. Of course I knew the money would be spent on weapons,' she said. 'Today, I realise that what I did just made everything worse.'

She said she had been been 'carried away' by her outrage over civilian suffering and had re-posted terrorist video messages on the internet out of a sense of defiance.

But she denied knowing about her husband's bomb plot and claimed she only began fund-raising for the jihad after he was arrested in 2007.

At the trial, which has been running for weeks and will carry over into next year, she is accused of assisting a terrorist group. Prosecutors say she and a 21-year-old Berlin man helped the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) and the German Taliban Mujahedin DTM.

Her husband and the two men who were convicted with him in May this year were trained in or near Afghanistan by the IJU. At their trial the trio said the IJU was friendly with al-Qaeda and sometimes visited al-Qaeda sites in the Pakistan mountains.

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