Four Algerians have been jailed for 10 to 12 years on Monday after a German court found them guilty of planning a bomb attack. The four men had been accused of planning to set off a bomb at a Christmas market in December 2000 in the French city of Strasbourg, near the German border. Police foiled the plan when they detained the men on December 26, 2000 in Frankfurt. Two of the four men denied they had plans to bomb the Christmas market and were in fact targeting a synagogue in Strasbourg. “The accused wanted to hit the nerve centre of a free, Western, civilized society,” Reuters quoted Judge Karlheinz Zeiher as saying. He added the men had trained in Afghanistan so they could carry out attacks as part of a “Holy War” on the West. Prosecutors had claimed that the four had been trained in Afghanistan at camps run by al Qaeda and planned to wage war in Europe, but charges of belonging to a terrorist organization were dropped to speed up the trail. The four — Lamine Maroni, Aeurobui Beandali, Salim Boukhari and Fouhad Sabour — allegedly had a cache of weapons, ammunition and explosives for the attack and also had contacts with similar extremists in Britain and Italy. Full Story
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