Life sentence?

It's been almost a year since the attack on US soldiers at Germany's Frankfurt airport, in which two men were killed and another two were seriously injured. The attacker was Arid Uka, a 21-year-old man from Kosovo, who grew up in Frankfurt.

On Friday, a German court foung Uka guilty of the killings, and sentenced him to life in prison. Judge Thomas Sagebiel cited aggravating circumstances, which rules out Uka from early release. The prosecution had argued there was an Islamist background to the attack.

Radicalized through the Internet

On the eve of the attack, Uka watched a video on the Internet allegedly showing a Muslim woman being raped by a US soldier. The video was in fact a sequence taken from a Hollywood movie, but was shown out of context on a jihadist propaganda website from Uzbekistan.

The next day, Uka packed a pistol and two knives and went to his job at Frankfurt airport.

While there, he encountered a group of US airmen. As 15 soldiers entered an airport bus, Uka also boarded and started firing his gun. He killed two soldiers and injured another two before his weapon jammed and he was overpowered.

Young, immature, depressed?

Defense lawyer Jens-Jörg Hoffman described the attacker as "a young, immature and depressed man running amok with tragic, deadly consequences." But he claimed the defendant was not a terrorist, a view shared by lawyer Michaela Roth.

"It was an act he himself did not comprehend," Roth told Deutsche Welle.

On the first day of the trial in August 2011, Uka distanced himself from the attack, but did not show any regret while relatives and survivors looked on.

"Even though an apology might be inappropriate, at least the defendant could show some understanding of the perspective of the relatives," said Marcus Steffel, lawyer for relatives of the two soldiers who died in the attack.

Federal prosecutor Jochen Weingart is convinced there was a jihadist motivation behind the attack, which he sees as a deliberate and treacherous move.

"We can assume that he would have killed more of the US soldiers if his gun didn't get jammed," Weingarten said.

According to German law, Weingarten's call for the maximum sentence rules out Ukra's jail term being reduced to 15 years in the course of his imprisonment.

An anti-American Kosovo Albanian

Arid Uka is an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, a country where the majority of the population is Muslim. However, Kosovo holds the US in high esteem because Washington supported it during the 1999 war with Serbia. After the Frankfurt attack, Uka's relatives in Kosovo stressed the family's pro-US attitude and said they were surprised by Uka's actions.

Uka's father is said to have brought up his children as devout Muslims, but without radical leanings. After the attack, the father immediately expressed his condolences and apologized to the victims.

"There are no indiciations pointing to radicalization within the family. There's not the least sign of any connections he might have had in that sense," Guido Steinberg, from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told Deutsche Welle.

On the social networking site Facebook, Arid Uka took the alias of Abu Reyyan (or "guardian of heaven's gate") and linked to a number of leading Salafist Islamists from across Germany. Yet according to the the investigation, Uka never actually met any of them in person. An alleged stay in an Islamist training camp in Bosnia could not be confirmed during the trial. According to witness accounts, it was unlikely that Uka actually attended any such camps.

"Most people have always assumed that you'd need some sort of training in order to successfully embark on an act of terrorism," Steinberg said. However, the Frankfurt airport attack could be the first one where the pepetrator became radicalized through the Internet alone, without any personal contact with other radical Islamists.

Author: Anila Shuka /ai
Editor: Shant Shahrigian