German authorities charge Afghan Taliban suspect and convicts ISIS terrorist group sympathizer

Authorities in Germany have filed charges against an Afghan national for killing a policeman. He is also alleged to have helped transport weapons for the militant Islamist group. Another court convicted an IS supporter.

A 20-year-old Afghan national was charged in Germany on Thursday with having committed a war crime and murder by allegedly beating a policeman and later shooting him dead, German prosecutors said.

The suspect, identified only by his first name Omaid N., is believed to have joined the Taliban in early 2013 and allegedly helped transport weapons for the Islamist group at least once.

He and others in his Taliban unit allegedly beat a captured policeman on the head using wooden slats, prosecutors said, adding that the suspect also fired a shot from a Kalashnikov at the captive.

“The policeman died either from the beating with the wooden slats or later from the shots,” said prosecutors.

Omaid N. was also set to carry out a suicide attack along with other members of the group.

“But he was not ready for that, and fled,” said prosecutors. They added that he managed to reach Germany in November of 2013 with the aid of smugglers. He was arrested May 19, 2017, and is now in detention pending his trial.

In a separate case, another German court convicted an Algerian man of aiding the “Islamic State” by helping smuggle a would-be fighter into Syria. The man, identified as Fayssal M.B., was already serving a two-year-nine-month sentence on an earlier charge of supporting IS.

German federal prosecutors have opened over a dozen investigations concerning alleged war crimes in Syria or Iraq, alongside dozens of cases of suspected membership in jihadi groups.

More than 1 million asylum seekers have arrived in Germany since 2015, including hundreds of thousands from Syria and Iraq. Some of those asylum seekers have helped provide valuable leads to investigators.

German authorities convicted their first German jihadi in July 2016. He was sentenced to two years in prison on war crimes charges after posing for photographs in Syria with the severed and impaled heads of two government soldiers.

Source: DW