A German court on Tuesday convicted five Tajik men for their membership in an Islamic State cell that plotted jihadist attacks in Germany and elsewhere.
The men, aged 25 to 34, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three years and eight months to nine and a half years, according to a court in Duesseldorf.
They are thought to have hung out with the Tajik-born perpetrator of the April 2017 truck attack in Stockholm, as well as the Macedonian-Austrian national who gunned down four people in Vienna in November 2020.
Sunatullokh K., 26, was handed the longest sentence for planning to shoot dead a YouTuber critical of Islam, who is based in Neuss, western Germany.
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The assault was foiled by investigators, said the court.
Farhodshoh K., 33, received eight-and-a-half years for plotting a contract murder in Albania.
The court said the killing was not carried out only because the perpetrators had “doubts about the identity of the target person during surveillance”.
The other three men, 34-year-old Muhammad Ali G., 29-year-old Azizjon B., and Komron B., 25, were convicted for their participation in a terrorist organization.
“Driven by their radical Islam conviction,” they had sought to carry out jihad for the IS, said the court.
All five had arrived in Germany as refugees.
Since 2019, the men have been in contact with a senior IS member in Afghanistan, who has passed on radical jihadist ideology to them.
IS-affiliated jihadists have carried out several violent attacks in Germany in recent years, the deadliest of which was a ramming attack on a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 that killed 12.
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