Germany convicts home-grown militants

DUSSELDORF, Germany, March 4 (UPI) -- A German court Thursday convicted four Islamists of planning to stage 9/11-like attacks against U.S. targets in Germany in what has been the country's biggest anti-terror process in decades.

A state court in the western German city of Dusseldorf handed the men, two of whom are German nationals converted to Islam, prison sentences ranging from five to 12 years.

Allegedly motivated by a fascination for Jihad and a hatred of the West, the quartet was convicted of plotting to kill hundreds, possibly thousands, of U.S. troops and civilians in Germany. Trained in Pakistan by the al-Qaida-linked Islamic Jihad Union, their targets included Ramstein Air Base, bars and nightclubs as well as several civilian airports.

Judge Ottmar Breidling said the men dreamed of "mounting a second September 11, 2001."

"If the accused had managed to do what they planned, it would have led to a monstrous bloodbath, primarily among U.S. Army personnel and also civilians," Breidling was quoted as saying by BBC News.

It was a grim reminder of what could have happened if police hadn't arrested Fritz Gelowicz, the ringleader of the group, and his accomplices, German nationals Daniel Schneider and Attila Selek as well as Turkish-born Adem Yilmaz, after intense surveillance in the fall 2007.

Authorities said a search of the suspects' hideout in the Sauerland region in western Germany turned up 26 detonators and around 1,500 pounds of hydrogen peroxide to make around 900 pounds of explosives -- that's 100 times the amount of explosives used in the 2005 London bombing attacks that killed 50 people.

But unlike the terrorists in England, the so-called Sauerland cell failed.

Germany's anti-terror police, who had been watching them around the clock for nine months, had already watered down the chemical, rendering it useless.

A few days later, police stormed the hideout and arrested three of the suspects. Selek, a German of Turkish origin, was arrested a few weeks later in Turkey.

Their trial started 10 months ago and came to a relatively speedy end Thursday after all of them had confessed extensively -- their guilty pleas amounted to around 1,200 pages.

During the trial, they testified openly about their first contacts with radical Islamism, their training in the Waziristan region, and their growing determination to stage attacks.

Gelowicz said last year that the United States' war on terror, its campaign in Iraq and the pictures from prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay showed him that "the West was leading a war against Islam."

He and his accomplices wanted to join active fighting in Iraq or Chechnya but were convinced to return to Europe to plot terror attacks, they said.

Their openness helped them to milder sentences.

Gelowicz, 30, and Schneider, 24 -- the two German converts – were each sentenced to 12 years in prison. Turkish national Yilmaz, 31, was sentenced to 11 years behind bars, with Selek, 25, handed a 5-year sentence.

Gelowicz, Schneider and Selek in their final statements renounced extremism, pledging not to revisit terrorism.