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Update: Cologne couple in court over ‘biological bomb plot’

A Tunisian man and his German wife went on trial Friday, charged with planning a foiled biological bomb attack in Germany with the deadly poison ricin.

Published: 7 June 2019 07:34 CEST
Update: Cologne couple in court over 'biological bomb plot'
Special command officers leave the Cologne building where they discovered the rincin in June 2018. Photo: DPA

Sief Allah H., 30, and his wife Yasmin, 43, were arrested a year ago by an anti-terrorist squad that found 84 milligrams of the toxin in their Cologne apartment.

The arrests likely prevented what would have been Germany's first biological attack, said Holger Münch, head of the BKA Federal Criminal Police Office, at the time.

Federal prosecutors said the couple had “for a long time identified with the aims and values of the foreign terrorist organization Islamic State”.

SEE ALSO: Germany arrests wife in foiled 'biological attack' plot

They decided in 2017 to detonate an explosive in a large crowd, “to kill and wound the largest possible number of people,” said prosecutors ahead of the trial in Düsseldorf.

Chief prosecutor Verena Bauer told the court the couple had planned to build a bomb with ricin and steel balls, and that they had purchased “nearly all the required parts” for the explosive.

Lawyers for the defendants said the accused did not plan to make statements in court.

Sief Allah H.'s defence meanwhile filed a motion against judge Jan van Lessen, claiming bias.

Hamster test

The pair had allegedly researched various forms of explosives before deciding on the deadly poison.

They ordered 3,300 castor beans over the internet and successfully made a small amount of ricin, a poison 6,000 times more potent than cyanide that can kill if swallowed, inhaled or injected, according to prosecutors.

Investigators also found 250 metal balls, two bottles of nail polish remover as well as wires soldered on lightbulbs.

Only the raid and arrests prevented “the production of a larger quantity of ricin and the building of an explosive,” said prosecutors.

The couple were caught after a tip-off from the US Central Intelligence Agency, which had noticed the large online purchase of castor seeds, according to German media reports.

News weekly Der Spiegel has reported that the couple were believed to have already been radicalized when they met online in 2014.

Sief Allah H., a former street vendor and labourer in Tunisia, in 2015 married Yasmin H., an unemployed doctor's assistant and mother of seven children from four different fathers, the report said.

The husband had been in contact with radical Islamists and tried twice in 2017 to travel to Syria via Turkey.

His wife helped him with flight and hotel bookings, but both trips failed.

Sief Allah H. also volunteered to help the IS in their propaganda work, and did so in early 2018 by publishing material of the jihadist group online, said prosecutors.

SEE ALSO: Tunisian man held in Cologne 'sought to build biological weapon'

Later, the couple decided to prepare an attack in Germany itself, and also bought a hamster to test the potency of the ricin.

“Very concrete preparations had been made for an act with a … biological bomb, which is a first for Germany,” said Münch.

If convicted of the charges of serious violence endangering the country, the defendants could each face up to 15 years in jail.

Two suspects were also arrested in August last year in Tunisia in connection with the case.

Germany, Europe's biggest economy, remains on high alert after several deadly attacks claimed by the IS group.

The worst attack, a 2016 truck rampage through a Berlin Christmas market by Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri, claimed 12 lives.

The trial is expected to last until the end of August.

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TRAIN

Trial to begin over Paris train attack that inspired movie

A Moroccan man goes on trial in France on Monday accused of an attempted terror attack on an Amsterdam-Paris train five years ago which was foiled by passengers whose heroic actions were turned into a Hollywood film.

Published: 14 November 2020 09:14 CET
Trial to begin over Paris train attack that inspired movie
Off-duty US servicemen Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos (left and right) and their friend Anthony Sadler (centre), who helped tackle the attacker. Photo: Thomas Samson/AFP
Director Clint Eastwood, 90, is on the witness list for the trial in Paris, and it is believed his 2018 film “The 15:17 to Paris” will serve as a reconstruction of the events of August 21, 2015.
   
Ayoub El Khazzani was tackled by passengers, including two off-duty American servicemen, shortly after emerging bare-chested and heavily armed from a toilet on a Thalys high-speed train.
   
Some 150 passengers were in the carriage with him.
   
Khazzani had an AK47 slung over his back, a bag of nearly 300 rounds of ammunition, and appeared to be “in a trance”, according to a young Frenchman waiting in the passageway, and the first to try to subdue Khazzani.
   
Another passenger, a Franco-American professor, came to the Frenchman's aid, grabbing Khazzani's assault rifle.
   
The attacker took a pistol out of his belt, shot and wounded the professor and reclaimed the AK47, only to be tackled afresh and disarmed by two American soldiers — Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos — who heard the commotion from a neighbouring carriage.
   
The soldiers were aided by their friend Anthony Sadler, with whom they were backpacking through Europe.
 
   
Stone was slashed in the neck and on the eyebrow and almost had his thumb sliced off with a box-cutter wielded by Khazzani.
   
“He had 270 rounds of ammunition on him, enough to kill 300 people,” according to Thibault de Montbrial, the lawyer for the three Americans hoping to attend the trial at a special anti-terror court from Monday.
   
According to the lawyer, there was no doubt his clients had prevented a “mass attack.”
   
Khazzani, who joined the Islamic State group in Syria in May 2015, is charged with “attempted terrorist murder”, and will be joined in the dock by three other men accused of helping him.
   
De Montbrial said the Americans, who played themselves in Eastwood's film, wish to attend the trial because they “want to tell” their story and “look into the eyes of the man they faced”.
   
However, they may not make it to Paris due to coronavirus restrictions.
 
 
'Remain calm'
 
The Thalys assault happened in the same year as the January 2015 massacre of staff at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, the killing of a policewoman, and the deadly hostage siege at the Hyper Cacher market — which left a total of 17 dead.
   
In November the same year, jihadists armed with assault rifles and explosives struck outside the national stadium, Paris cafes and the Bataclan concert hall, killing 130 people and wounding more than 350 in the deadliest peacetime attack in France's history.
   
Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud is believed to have been one of the masterminds behind the Thalys and November 13 attacks, as well as others in Europe, including the Brussels bombings of March 2016 that killed 32 civilians.
   
Abaaoud was killed by police in a Paris suburb five days after he shot indiscriminately at packed cafe terraces in Paris on the night of the coordinated November 13 attacks.
   
The Khazzani trial comes at a time of heightened security alert in France following three attacks blamed on jihadists in a month — a knife attack outside Charlie Hebdo's former offices, the beheading of a history teacher, and a deadly stabbing spree at a church in Nice.
   
“We must remain calm and rigorous regardless of recent tragedies,” said Lea Dordilly, a lawyer for co-accused Bilal Chatra, who was 19 at the time of the thwarted train attack.
   
He was allegedly recruited in Turkey by Abaaoud, and is suspected of being an advance scout for Khazzani in getting into Europe via the migrant trail from Syria.
   
Khazzani does not deny having boarded the train with the intent of committing an attack, but claims to have had a change of heart at the last minute, too late to avoid the confrontation with the Americans.
   
His lawyer Sarah Mauger-Poliak claims Khazzani is a changed man who has rejected radical Islamist doctrine and regrets his actions.
   
The trial is scheduled to last until December 17.
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