Life sentence for man guilty of US soldier killings

Feb 10, 2012, 13:18 GMT

Frankfurt - A Kosovo-born man was Friday sentenced by a German court to life imprisonment for the killing last year of two US soldiers at Frankfurt airport, in a case described as the first successful Islamist-motivated attack in Germany.

Arid Uka was also convicted on three counts of attempted murder.

The 22-year-old had boarded a bus carrying US soldiers at Frankfurt airport on March 2 and began shooting. He was only prevented from killing more when his pistol jammed and he was overpowered by soldiers and German police.

Although prosecutors said he had been radicalized by jihadist propaganda on the internet, investigators said they had found no evidence linking Uka to a terrorist group.

As the exceptional severity of his crime was also proved, he is unlikely to be eligible for parole in 15 years, as would be usual under German law.

He earlier told police he shot the uniformed Americans to take revenge for US military operations against Muslims. The soldiers were unarmed at the time. They were on their way to the nearby US army base Ramstein, and from there were due to leave for Afghanistan.

Uka had asked for a cigarette so as to start a conversation, then asked where the personnel were headed, investigators said.

The defence said that Uka was irrational at the time of the killings as a result of watching a film the evening before that depicted US soldiers raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl. Uka had believed the depiction was real.

At the beginning of the trial in August, Uka had shown remorse for his crimes, telling the court: 'It's true what the prosecution says ... I wanted to kill the soldiers ... today I don't understand myself any more how it could have got so far.'

'I had to do something and believed that there was no alternative,' he said.

Prosecutors told the court he had wanted to make his own contribution to jihad and had made himself a 'master of life and death.'

Though he grew up in Germany, Uka now faces deportation to Kosovo since he does not have German citizenship.

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