German court sentences three for helping terrorist groups

Jul 19, 2011, 16:05 GMT

Munich - A woman and two men were sentenced by a German court on Tuesday for promoting Islamist terrorist groups online, as part of wider proceedings against a total of eight Islamist suspects.

The oldest of the three, aged 25, was handed a six-month suspended prison sentence. The woman, 24, was ordered to participate in a social training programme.

The third person, who was 15 at the time of the deeds and is now 18, was also found guilty but was given a two-year grace period in which a sentence could be applied if necessary.

All three admitted at the start of the trial to charges that they had distributed radical Islamist propaganda material, including videos, on the online portals of the Global Islamic Media Front network.

The threat of online radicalization is being taken seriously in Germany, after a young Muslim man with Kosovan roots shot dead two US airmen at Frankfurt airport in March. Prosecutors said at the time that he had been inspired by Islamist propaganda on the internet.

The defendants sentenced Tuesday, of whom the youngest is Turkish and the other two are German, belong to a larger group being tried on charges of supporting the terrorist organizations al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam, as well as membership of a criminal organization.

All three have since distanced themselves from their earlier radical positions and were living a normal life, the court found.

The remaining five, whose cases are being heard separately, are to be sentenced in the coming months.

Meanwhile police raided eight homes and the office of an imam in and near Stuttgart, over suspicions that four Germans and two Turkish nationals, aged 42 to 51, had been fundraising for international Islamist causes.