In an emotional confession to a Frankfurt court as his murder trial began on Wednesday, Arid Uka said he had become radicalised by online extremist propaganda before carrying out a lone gun attack US Air Force bus in March.
What I did was wrong, but I cannot undo what I did, he said.
Uka blamed a video purporting to show American servicemen raping a young Muslim girl for prompting him to try and stop other US soldiers from getting to Afghanistan.
I thought what I saw in that video, these people would do in Afghanistan, he told the court.
But the rape footage, billed as an authentic video entitled what was done to our sisters, turned out to be a fake using footage scene from the 2007 anti-Iraq war film Redacted, directed by Hollywoods Brian de Palma.
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A 21-year-old Albanian from Kosovo has confessed to killing two US airmen at Frankfurt airport, saying that he had been influenced by Islamist propaganda online.
Arid Uka is charged with two counts of murder for killing Nicholas J Alden, 25, from South Carolina, and Zachary R Cuddeback, 21, from Virginia in March of this year. He also faces three counts of attempted murder in connection with injuring two others.
Prosecutor Herbert Deimer told the court in Frankfurt that Uka went to the airport "to kill an indeterminate number of American soldiers, but if possible a large number".
Uka confessed to the killings after the indictment was read, saying: "What I did was wrong but I cannot undo what I did."
He encouraged other radical Muslims not to seek inspiration in his attack, telling them not to be deceived by "lying propaganda" on the internet. "To this day I try to understand what happened and why I did it ... but I don't understand."
Sounds like he's angling to get a less than fifteen year sentence in Germany...
Uka said he had become increasingly introverted in the months before the attack, staying at home and watching Islamist propaganda on the internet. On the night before the crime, he said he followed a link to a video posted on Facebook that supposedly showed American soldiers raping a teenage Muslim girl. It was actually a scene from Redacted, a 2007 anti-war film by Brian De Palma.
He said he then determined to anything possible to prevent more American soldiers from going to Afghanistan. "I thought what I saw in that video these people would do in Afghanistan," he told the court as he wiped away tears. Uka admitted that the airman driving the bus had not been going to Afghanistan, when asked by the prosecutor.
The indictment says Uka went to the airport armed with a pistol, extra ammunition and two knives. Inside, he spotted two US servicemen arriving and followed them to their US air force bus. Sixteen servicemen were on or near the bus.
Uka approached one of them for a cigarette. He confirmed they were US air force members en route to Afghanistan, then "turned around, put the magazine that had been concealed in his backpack into his pistol, and cocked the weapon", according to the indictment.
He first shot unarmed Alden in the back of the head. He then boarded the vehicle shouting "Allahu Akbar" and gunned down Cuddeback, who was the driver, before firing at others. He injured two others -- one victim has permanently lost sight in one eye -- before his gun jammed and he fled. Uka was then chased down and caught.
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#3
He will be going to a maximum security prison, or Langstrafenanstalt. But had his crimes been before 1970, he would likely have gone to a Zuchthaus, a prison for hard, physical labor, where prisoners worked to the point of collapse.
Many criminal Nazis spent their last days in such places. By 1970 few who did were still alive. German prison is not pleasant, like Sweden's.
#3
Germans pride themselves in having police and bureaucratic regulations for all things. My favorite was a 500DM fine for stepping on the third rail of a streetcar, which equitably worked out to about a DM per ampere that would be flowing through your still standing earthly remains.
[An Nahar] A shooting outside a Copenhagen mosque after prayers to mark the end of the Mohammedan fasting month of Ramadan has left one person dead and at least two people injured, police said Tuesday.
Police front man Lau Thygesen said the shooting took place outside the Mohammedan Culture Institute, located in the Danish capital's western Vesterbro district, and that the roads surrounding the mosque and a nearby car park have been cordoned off. Thygesen could not immediately provide more details.
A front man for the Mohammedan institute, who declined to give his name before hanging up the telephone, told The News Agency that Dare Not be Named that the incident took place on a parking lot next to the mosque as hundreds of people were leaving the 9 a.m. prayer service.
Kuran Qureshi, who attended the prayers, told Danish broadcaster TV2 in a live interview that he had witnessed two groups of "younger men having some kind of argument" on the parking lot just before the shooting started.
Just boys being boys, then. Stop being judgemental.
Qureshi said he had heard "15, maybe 20 shots," as he drove away from the area with his 10-year-old son. "I saw people, women, children ducking and hiding behind cars. It was really unpleasant."
The Mohammedan Cultural Institute was founded in the late 1970s by Pak immigrants. It includes a mosque as well as facilities where Islam is being taught to boys and girls in Danish.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
