Teenager sentenced to 4 years in prison for planning Islamist attack – Firstpost

A 15-year-old boy was sentenced to four years in prison by a German court on Friday for organising an Islamist attack on a Christmas market in Leverkusen, in the west of the country.

According to a statement from the Cologne court, the teenager intended to rent a truck and “kill as many people as possible” by bringing it into the conventional market.

The court said the boy began to “radicalise” in the autumn of 2023.

A video posted in a chat group proclaiming his intention to launch an attack on “infidels” with a recognizable Islamist symbol in the background was one of the pieces of evidence used against the accused.

The court said the youth and another teenager who was to record the incident and distribute the footage had planned it together.

The 16-year-old from the state of Brandenburg, near Berlin, will be tried in a separate court from July.

In recent years, there have been a number of incidents in Germany by Islamist extremists; the bloodiest of these was the truck rampage at a Christmas market in Berlin in December 2016, which claimed the lives of twelve people.

More recently, the death of a police officer in a knife attack on Mannheim's market square at the end of May was said to have had an Islamist motive.

In Germany, the number of individuals classified as Islamist radicals decreased slightly, from 27,480 in 2022 to 27,200 last year, according to data released by the Federal Domestic Intelligence Service.

But Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said Germany would “continue to intensify the fight against Islamist terrorism” when presenting the report.

Two boys and two girls, aged 15 to 16, were arrested before Easter this year in another case involving teenagers, suspected of organizing an Islamist attack in the same district of western Germany.

The young age of the suspects, according to North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Herbert Reul, left him “speechless”, adding that it represented an “enormous challenge for society as a whole”.

The four young people allegedly intended to carry out knife and Molotov cocktail attacks in the name of the Islamic State organization, according to an article in the popular German daily Bild.