A German court on Thursday sentenced a 31-year-old Tunisian to 10 years in prison for planning a biological bomb attack with the poison ricin.
Islamic State sympathizer Sief Allah H., 31, had ordered castor seeds, explosives and metal ball bearings on the Internet to build the toxic bomb, a spokesman for the higher regional court in Duesseldorf said.
He was found guilty of producing a biological weapon and of planning a serious act of violent subversion.
Photo: AFP
His 43-year-old German wife, Yasmin, stands accused of helping him build the bomb, but she is being tried separately after the court accused her defense lawyers of attempting to spin out the case with a 140-page statement on Thursday. Her trial is to resume on Wednesday next week.
The couple “wanted to create a climate of fear and uncertainty among the German population,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur quoted judge Jan van Lessen as saying, adding that they had produced enough ricin to potentially kill up to 13,500 people.
The couple has been on trial since June last year following their arrest in 2018 by a counterterrorism squad that found 84mg of the toxin in their apartment in Cologne, Germany.
The arrests likely prevented what would have been Germany’s first biological attack, German Federal Criminal Police Office President Holger Muench said at the time.
Federal prosecutors said that the couple had “for a long time identified with the aims and values of the foreign terrorist organization Islamic State.”
They in 2017 decided to detonate an explosive in a large crowd, “to kill and wound the largest possible number of people,” prosecutors said ahead of the trial.
Produced by processing castor beans, ricin is lethal in minute doses if swallowed, inhaled or injected, and 6,000 times more potent than cyanide, with no known antidote.
The couple ordered 3,300 castor beans over the Internet and made a small amount of ricin.
They were caught after a tip-off from the US CIA, which had noticed the large online purchase, German media reported.
Sief Allah H. admitted to building the bomb, but denied planning an attack on German soil.
His defense lawyers had asked for a sentence of eight years.
“He is certainly guilty, we do not deny that,” they reportedly said.
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