Four jailed for Germany bomb plot

Four men linked to al Qaida were jailed today over a foiled plot to attack US targets in Germany that could have caused massive devastation.

The Islamic fundamentalists had planned attacks against American citizens and facilities including the US Air Force’s Ramstein base.

The case “has shown with frightening clarity what acts young people who are filled with hatred, blinded and seduced by wrong-headed ideas of jihad are prepared and able to carry out,” Judge Ottmar Breidling said.

Three defendants – Fritz Gelowicz and Daniel Schneider, both German converts to Islam, and Turkish citizen Adem Yilmaz – were convicted of membership in a terrorist organisation, while Turkish citizen Attila Selek was convicted of supporting a terrorist organisation.

All four also were convicted of preparing explosive devices.

They had confessed during the trial and showed no reaction as Judge Breidling announced the verdict.

Gelowicz and Schneider was sentenced to 12 years in prison, Yilmaz to 11 years and Selek five.

The judge said the planned attack could have been on a par with the 2005 London transport bombings or the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

The defendants’ goal was not only to attack Americans – for example at pubs, discos and other public places – but also to influence a German parliamentary vote in October 2007 on extending the country’s military deployment in Afghanistan, the court found.

The US State Department said the group they belonged to, the Islamic Jihad Union, was responsible for co-ordinated bombings outside the US and Israeli embassies in July 2004 in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. Members have been trained in explosives by al Qaida instructors, and the group has ties to Osama bin Laden and fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

The German cell had stockpiled nearly a ton of highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide, purchased from a chemical supplier, and could have mixed it with other substances to make explosives.

But German police had been watching them and covertly replaced the hydrogen peroxide with a diluted substitute.