The conviction of a man to 14 years in prison for an Islamist-motivated knife attack on an ICE train in Bavaria is legally binding. The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) announced on Friday in Karlsruhe that the review of the Munich Higher Regional Court’s ruling on multiple attempted murder charges, among other things, did not reveal any legal errors. The third criminal division rejected the defendant’s appeal.
On November 6, 2021, the then 27-year-old attacked four unsuspecting passengers with a knife on an ICE train traveling from Passau to Nuremberg. Three of the men were seriously injured, but they survived the attack thanks to quick medical help. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office had assumed that the crime had a radical Islamist background and had demanded a life sentence. The victims’ lawyers, who appeared as co-plaintiffs in the trial, joined the demand. The defense, however, saw the Palestinian, who grew up in Syria, as an incapable, paranoid schizophrenic. She pleaded for an acquittal and placement in a psychiatric hospital. Your client felt like he was being followed and monitored.
However, as the Higher Regional Court found, the man, who had been living in Germany since 2014, was fully responsible when he committed the crime. “The court heard several psychiatric experts on this question, who came to the conclusion that the defendant merely faked a mental illness in order to avoid punishment,” the BGH explained in its statement.
According to the findings of the Munich State Security Senate, the Muslim defendant had become extremely radicalized in his faith from 2017 onwards and adhered to an Islamist-Salafist ideology, as the BGH announced. He rejected the secular legal and social order of the Federal Republic of Germany and wanted to participate as a lone perpetrator in the so-called jihad, the holy war against “infidels”, through a terrorist act of violence in Germany. The court assumed that the murder characteristics were base motives and insidiousness.