Jihadist who stabbed four people on a German train gets 14 years in prison after court rejects plea to insanity, ruling his Islamic beliefs were to blame
- Abdalrahman A. has been convicted of attempted murder and grievous bodily harm for the November 2021 assault
- Judge at the Munich Higher Regional Court identified a jihadist motive
- He said that from May 2021, Abdalrahman A. began to fantasize “outwardly” about “participating in jihad, or armed struggle”
A German court on Friday sentenced a Syrian-born man to 14 years in prison for an Islamist knife attack on a train in which he injured four passengers.
The Munich Higher Regional Court has convicted the defendant, identified only as Abdalrahman A., 28, of attempted murder and grievous bodily harm for the November 2021 attack.
Defense lawyers had argued that their client, a Palestinian who grew up in Syrian refugee camps, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and should be placed in psychiatric care.
But the presiding judge, Jochen Boesl, rejected a defense of mental illness based on seven expert evaluations of the accused and identified a jihadist motive.
Pictured: The defendant, in the front, stands with his lawyers Martin Gelbricht, rear left, and Maximilian Baer, rear second left, in court in Munich on Friday, December 23
Boesl said the defendant had regularly listened to radio programs “with Islamic content” and from May 2021 “outwardly” began to fantasize about “participating in jihad, or armed struggle.”
“These views led him to this act,” Boesl said of the sudden and unprovoked attack on a high-speed train between the Bavarian cities of Regensburg and Nuremberg.
“He wanted to kill non-Muslim passengers because he believed they were non-believers and therefore had no right to life.”
The stabbing took place near Neumarkt in the Upper Palatinate, and the train was stopped in Seubersdorf, southeast of Nuremberg
Islamist extremists have carried out several violent attacks in Germany in recent years, the deadliest of which was a truck disaster at a Christmas market in Berlin in December 2016 that killed 12 people.
The Tunisian attacker, a rejected asylum seeker, was a supporter of the Islamic State jihadist group.
More recently, in May 2021, a Syrian jihadist was given a life sentence for stabbing to death a German man and seriously injuring his partner in a homophobic attack in the eastern city of Dresden.
Police and emergency services on the secene in Seubersdorf In Der Oberpfalz, between Regensburg and Nuremberg, on November 6, 2021
The number of people on the Islamist-extremist spectrum in Germany fell from 28,715 in 2020 to 28,290 in 2021, according to a report by the federal domestic intelligence agency BfV.
However, Interior Secretary Nancy Faeser has said that the “potential threat remains high” from Islamist extremism.