Radicalised German teens sentenced for attacking Gurdwara
Wednesday, 22/03/2017
http://epaper.dailypostindia.com/Details.aspx?id=174988&boxid=61392&uid=&dat=2017-03-22
Berlin: Three radicalised German-born teens were on Tuesday sentenced to up to seven years in juvenile detention for carrying out a “religiously motivated” bomb attack on a Gurdwara that left a Sikh priest badly injured.
The judge ruled that the teens should serve sentences of seven years, six years and nine months, and six years in a juvenile detention center, a court spokesman said.
Prosecutors had argued that the three 17-year-olds - who were 16 at the time of the act - had attacked the Sikh temple in Essen out of radical Islamist motivations to kill “non-believers”.
The youth court on Tuesday agreed that their motive had been hate for other religions, it said. The trial uncovered no evidence of the three having direct contact with terror group ISIS.
Two convicts set off a homemade bomb blast after a wedding party on April 16, 2016 at a temple belonging to the Sikh Gurdwara Nanaksar congregation, wounding three people, including one Sikh priest seriously.
The bomb, crafted from a fire extinguisher packed with explosive chemicals, also destroyed the doors of the temple. The third was found guilty of conspiring to murder for participating in the planning and preparation of the attack, and was sentenced to six years in youth detention. The defendants Yusuf T, Mohamed B and Tolga I, were aged 16 years when they detonated the explosive device. All three boys were born in Germany, the ‘Local Germany’ newspaper said. The explosion was a “terror attack” carried out by radical Islamists, authorities had said.
Over 13,000 Sikhs live in Germany, many of them based in Cologne and around 200 members of the community live in Essen in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
