German trial opens over alleged Islamist Sweden attack plot
November 15, 2024
A trial opens in Jena in the eastern German state of Thuringia on Friday against two men with Afghan citizenship accused of plotting a terrorist attack near the Swedish parliament in Stockholm.
What are the pair accused of?
One of the defendants is accused of supporting and applying for membership of a terrorist organization, the "Islamic State Khorasan Province," often referred to as either ISIS-K or ISPK.
The other is accused of supporting the organization, by arranging financial transfers.
"On orders of the ISPK, the accused are alleged to have planned an attack in the vicinity of the Swedish parliament," the upper regional court said in a statement confirming the case's start date.
The men allegedly intended to kill as many police officers and other people as possible with firearms.
"But before their arrest on [March 19, 2024], multiple attempts by the defendants to procure weapons failed," the court said.
News of the arrests of the men, aged 30 and 23 when they were collared by authorities, was made public in August this year.
Alleged plot hatched amid uproar over Quran burnings
The two men made the alleged plans, with the prosecution planning to use their private message exchanges on the Telegram service to demonstrate a large part of their case, in the aftermath of two prominent protests where a copy of the Muslim holy book the Quran was burned in the Swedish capital in the summer of 2023.
In one case an Iraqi Christian refugee carried out the act and in the other it was a right-wing Scandinavian political activist.
Protests, and even attacks on Swedish diplomatic buildings in places like Iraq, followed in the aftermath of the incidents, as several Muslim governments like Saudi Arabia criticized the scenes.
Damaging the Quran is a crime in most of the Muslim world, often punished with jail sentences or potentially the death penalty.
Turkey, NATO's only majority-Muslim member, also sought to capitalize on the incidents to secure concessions in return for eventually allowing Sweden to join the defensive military alliance, as it sought to in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
msh/lo (dpa, open sources)