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FRANKFURT — In certainly one of postwar Germany’s most spectacular terrorism trials, a army officer who had posed as a Syrian refugee was sentenced to 5 and a half years in jail on Friday for his position in a far-right terrorist plot to homicide outstanding public figures within the hopes of bringing down the democratic order.
The case of First Lieutenant Franco A., whose surname was abbreviated by the authorities in step with German privateness legal guidelines, shocked the nation when he was arrested 5 years in the past and has pushed the nation to confront the creeping risk of far-right infiltration within the army and the police.
Franco A. was convicted of plotting terrorism, unlawful possession of weapons, in addition to fraud for his efforts to move himself off as a refugee, though three months of his sentence are thought of as served as a result of he has been in detention since being rearrested earlier this yr.
He was caught in 2017 attempting to gather a loaded gun that he had hidden in a toilet on the Vienna airport. His fingerprints later revealed his second, faux identification as a Syrian refugee, setting off alarm bells and an investigation that may span three international locations and a number of intelligence companies.
Prosecutors have accused him of planning one or a number of assassinations utilizing his faux Syrian identification with the intention of stoking rising fears over immigration in Germany and triggering a nationwide disaster.
The case emerged as one other warning for a rustic that has spent many years atoning for its Nazi previous however on the identical has a observe file of failing to completely handle far-right extremism and terrorism.
Franco A. maintained his innocence till the top, however a lot of revelations over the course of the 13-month trial hardened the case in opposition to him.
A sequence of anti-Semitic and racist audio memos he had recorded of himself, a few of them fantasizing about “murdering” political enemies and applauding anybody “destroying” the state, have been performed in courtroom, leaving little doubt concerning the “hardened far-right mind-set” prosecutors cited as his political motive.
Accused by prosecutors of possessing greater than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, 4 weapons and about 50 explosives, a few of it stolen from army bases the place he had been stationed, Franco A. slipped up early within the trial and acknowledged that he had weapons in his possession.
“The possession and acquisition happened,” he mentioned, although he refused to say the place he obtained the weapons, amongst them a G3 assault rifle, or the place he disposed of them. To at the present time, they haven’t been discovered.
Franco A. started the trial as a free man, having been launched from pretrial detention three and a half years earlier than it opened. However in a dramatic scene at a subway cease in February, Franco A. was taken again into custody after touring to the house of a fellow soldier and selecting up a purchasing bag filled with Nazi memorabilia.
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