German teens sentenced for attack on gurdwara

Berlin, March 21

Three radicalised German-born teens were today sentenced to up to seven years in juvenile detention for carrying out a “religiously motivated” bomb attack on a gurdwara that left a Sikh priest badly injured.

The judge ruled that the teens should serve sentences of seven years, six years and nine months, and six years in a juvenile detention centre.

Prosecutors had argued that the three — who were 16 at the time of the act — had attacked the gurdwara in Essen out of radical Islamist motivations to kill “non-believers”. The trial uncovered no evidence of the three having direct contact with terror group IS.

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Two convicts had set off a homemade bomb after a wedding party on April 16, 2016 at a temple belonging to the Sikh Gurdwara Nanaksar congregation, wounding three people. The bomb, crafted from a fire extinguisher packed with explosive chemicals, also destroyed the doors. 

The third was found guilty of conspiring to murder. Yusuf T, Mohamed B and Tolga I were aged 16 when they detonated the device. All three were born in Germany.

Over 13,000 Sikhs live in Germany, many of them in Cologne and around 200 in Essen in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. —PTI