GERMANY: FAR-RIGHT EXTREMIST SYNAGOGUE ATTACKER SENTENCED TO LIFE IN PRISON

Mon 21 December 2020:

A German court has sentenced the attacker behind a deadly 2019 attack on a synagogue and surrounding areas in Halle to life in prison.

Far-right extremist Stephan B. was found guilty of two murders and more than 50 counts of attempted murder at the end of his 26-day trial on Monday.

Announcing the verdict on Monday morning, Judge Ursula Mertens noted that the far-right extremist Stephan Balliet had repeatedly tried to relativise the motives for his “cowardly attack” during the five-month trial.

The 28-year-old was handed a life sentence as well as preventive detention and an acknowledgment of the gravity of the crime, in effect ruling out an early release after 15 years in prison.

The defence had declined to make a plea for less than the maximum penalty, merely requesting a “fair sentence”.

In one court session, Balliet said he would have also murdered children “so that my own children won’t have to do that in the future”.

On October 9 last year, Stephan B. attempted to blast his way into Halle synagogue in eastern Germany, where 52 people were observing Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. He failed largely because his arsenal of homemade firearms and explosives couldn’t breach the locked outer gates.

In frustration, he shot dead two other people — 40-year-old passerby Jana L. and 20-year-old Kevin S., a workman eating his lunch in a nearby kebab shop — before firing at several police officers and other passersby as he made his escape.

Balliet, who was not a member of an organised neo-Nazi terrorist cell but had been radicalised in online forums, said he had felt “superseded” by the hundreds of thousands of refugees who entered Germany in the summer and autumn of 2015.

Judge Ursula Mertens said the defendant would sit in his childhood bedroom at the age of 27, soaking up “crude conspiracy theories” on the internet. The judge said she could not blame his family for failing to avert the crimes, but only because they refused to testify and did not appear to disabuse him of his extremist worldview.

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