A German court on Tuesday convicted five Tajik men for their membership of an ISIS cell that planned terrorist attacks in Germany and abroad.
The men, aged 25 to 34, were given jail terms of between three years and eight months to nine-and-a-half years, a court in Duesseldorf said.
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They are believed to have moved in the same circles as the Tajik-born perpetrator behind the Stockholm truck attack of April 2017, 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.
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 Muhammadali G., 29-year-old Azizjon B. and Komron B., 25, were convicted for their participation in a terrorist organization.
All five had arrived in Germany as refugees.
From 2019, the men were in contact with a leading ISIS member in Afghanistan who transmitted to them radical extremist ideology.
ISIS-linked extremists have committed several violent attacks in Germany in recent years, with the worst being a ramming attack at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 that killed 12.
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