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Europe
Court convicts Italian woman who joined ISIS[Ynet] A court has convicted in absentia an Italian woman and her Albanian husband on terrorism charges for traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State group. In the first case in Italy involving foreign fighters operating inside the war zone, the court on Monday sentenced Maria Giulia Sergio to nine years in prison and her husband, Aldo Kobuzi, to 10 years. They are believed to be in Syria. Members of Sergio's family, who also were planning to join her in Syria, also were convicted. They included her father, who was convicted of a lesser charge of organizing the journey of jihadists and sentenced to four years in jail. He was arrested in mid-2015, six months after his daughter and son-in-law had departed for Syria. German school in Istanbul repudiates ban on Christmas [DeutscheWelle] A German-funded school in Istanbul has reneged on an earlier directive saying it would ban all things relating to Christmas. The Turkish managed school claimed that it was all a "misunderstanding". The effective Christmas ban had prompted uproar in Germany where German politicians had criticized the move as part of a larger change away from secularism across Turkey under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's leadership. German state minister: "We are in a state of war" [Ynet] The interior minister of the German state of Saarland said on Tuesday Germany is in a state of war after a man drove a truck into a crowd at a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring 48, in a suspected terrorist attack. "We must say that we are in a state of war, although some people, who always only want to see good, do not want to see this," the minister, Klaus Bouillon, told German broadcaster SR. Austria arrests Moroccan on suspicion of planning attack in Salzburg [Ynet] Austria has arrested a 25-year-old asylum seeker from Morocco on suspicion of planning an attack during the holiday season in the city of Salzburg, prosecutors said on Tuesday. A search on Monday of an accommodation centre for asylum seekers in the town of Fuschl am See, where the man was living, found "no materials clearly required for the execution of an attack", the Salzburg prosecutors' office said in a statement. It could not, however, be ruled out that he was planning an attack, a spokesman added. The formal accusation against the suspect is that he belongs to an unspecified "terrorist organization". Posted by: trailing wife 2016-12-22 |
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