A Kosovo-Albanian man who killed two US airmen and wounded two others in a gun attack at Frankfurt airport last March was sentenced to life in prison by German court on Friday. Arid Uka, a 22-year-old who was raised in Germany, had confessed to the attack and said he acted after seeing a video apparently showing US soldiers raping Muslim women.
Wearing a black hooded top, he smiled when police removed the handcuffs after bringing him into the Frankfurt courtroom, then sat with eyes downcast as Judge Thomas Sagebiel read out a detailed chronology of the attack. "Yes, this is indeed the first Islamic-motivated terror strike to have happened in Germany," the judge said.
The court in Germany's financial capital heard how the gunman walked up to airmen boarding a US Army bus and asked one of them for a cigarette. After establishing that they were heading to Afghanistan, Uka shot a 25-year-old man in the back of the head, killing him, according to prosecutors. He then boarded the bus, shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is Greatest) and shot dead a 21-year-old airman sitting in the driver's seat. He wounded two others and pulled the trigger on a fifth target when his gun jammed.
Uka's defence counsel Jens Joerg Hoffmann said after he was found guilty that he would appeal against the sentence within a week. "We have to appeal," Hoffmann told Reuters. "We think it was not a jihadist attack, it was rage. He ran amok."
The judge had cited aggravating circumstances, meaning he will spend more than 15 years in jail. In Germany those sentenced to life are released after 15 years. The aggravating circumstances mean he will be in jail for a least 18 years. The shooting shocked Americans. US President Barack Obama said he was outraged and the government of Kosovo, where Uka was born, also condemned the attack. But fears it might be part of a militant plot were allayed when German prosecutors said he was likely to have been working alone, although he refused to tell the judge where he obtained the 9mm pistol used in the shooting.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.