The Telegraph UK
written by Allan Hall, in Berlin
Thursday March 4, 2010 at 5:09PM GMT
Four Muslim fanatics dreamed of "mounting a second September 11" with a series of bomb attacks on a US military base in Germany as well as nightclubs and restaurants used by American servicemen.
The gang, two of whom were German-born but converted to Islam, plotted to detonate explosives 100 times more powerful than those used in the attacks on the London Underground in July 2005, in a "monstrous bloodbath", a court heard.
Had the plot not been foiled the gang, a cell of a terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda, would have killed 150 soldiers, along with women and children in a "mass murder unrivalled in Germany."
On Thursday, at the end of a nine-month trial, the ringleader, Fritz Gelowicz, 30, the son of a doctor and engineer, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the plot. His sidekick Daniel Schneider, 24, was also given an 12-year sentence. Adem Yilmaz, 31, a Turkish national, was sentenced to 11 years and Attila Selek, 25, a Turkish German, was sentenced to five years.
Judge Ottmar Breidling said the case: "has shown with frightening clarity what acts young people who are filled with hatred, blinded and seduced by wrong-headed ideas of jihad are prepared and able to carry out."
"Never before had there been a terror attack of that dimension in Germany," he said. "You were blinded by a strange, hate-filled notion of jihad and you turned yourselves into angels of death in the name of Islam."
The gang, known as the "Sauerland Cell" after the tourist region where they stockpiled massive amounts of chemicals for the bombs, had planned to carry out the attacks at the US Air Force base at Ramstein and in restaurants and nightclubs in the area, in October 2007. It was to coincide with a vote in parliament to extend German participation in the Nato force in Afghanistan.
Gelowicz, who came from a family which "seemed to be the epitome of middle-class harmony"; Schneider and Yilmaz were captured in the Sauerland region in 2007 after storing vast quantities of hydrogen peroxide, suitable for making car bombs and other explosives.
Attila Selek, a Turkish German, was later arrested in Turkey where he was to acquire the detonators for the bombs. He was extradited to Germany in 2008.
The group was being watched by intelligence agents at a holiday cottage the men had rented as part of what has been called the biggest surveillance operation in German post-war history.
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