Four Islamists arrested over failed bomb plot in Germany

Germany put on trial Monday four alleged Islamist militants for plotting a failed bomb attack at a railway station and planning the murder of a far-right anti-Muslim activist.

Defendant Marco Gaebel, a 27-year old German national, is accused of planting a self-made pipe bomb in a sports bag at the main train station of Bonn, capital of the former West Germany, in December 2012.

The bomb failed to go off, but the discovery of the explosives sparked a major terrorism alert that caused travel chaos at the station two weeks before Christmas.

“He wanted to insidiously kill an indeterminate number of people, using highly dangerous means and with base motives,” prosecutor Horst Salzmann told the packed, high-security courtroom in the western city of Duesseldorf.

The same suspect was also co-accused in plotting to kill the leader of populist anti-immigrant group Pro-NRW in North Rhine-Westphalia, the state where Bonn is located, in March 2013.

The right-wing fringe group had staged an anti-Muslim street protest and shown caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed outside a local mosque.

With the bomb plot, Gaebel “planned an attack on a soft target in retaliation for the exhibition of Mohammed cartoons in Germany,” said the prosecutor.

Defence lawyers argued that the bomb was a dummy, pointing out that no detonator was found.

The other three suspects were Albanian national Enea Buzo, 44, Turkish-German Koray Durmaz, 25, and German Tayfun Sevim, 24.

They had allegedly obtained two handguns with silencers and explosives, prosecutors have charged.

The four are accused of having planned an imminent attack on the Pro-NRW activist in the city of Leverkusen when they were arrested in March last year.

Gaebel was charged with attempted murder which carries a maximum life term in jail.

All four also face charges of forming a “radical Islamist” terrorist group, conspiracy to murder and weapons charges, which carry terms of up to 15 years.

“They shared the goal of attacking ‘unbelievers’ in Germany and their representatives,” said the prosecutor.

The start of the trial was delayed by more than one hour after defence lawyers unsuccessfully sought to have the case thrown out, claiming that the judges were biased against the defendants.

The panel under judge Frank Schreiber has invited 150 witnesses and scheduled an initial 55 hearings for the trial, which is expected to last two years.