Arid Uka

Arid Uka (born February 8, 1990 in Mitrovica e Titos , SFR Yugoslavia ) committed a murder attempt on March 2, 2011 at the age of 21 at Frankfurt Airport .

The Kosovar living in Frankfurt-Sossenheim killed two US soldiers and seriously injured two others. The act is considered the first Islamist- motivated attack with fatalities in Germany.

Course of action

With the exclamation Allahu akbar ("God is great") Uka opened fire with a pistol on unarmed passengers and the driver of a bus of the United States Armed Forces waiting for passengers at Terminal 2 of Frankfurt Airport . The bus was supposed to bring US soldiers who had landed in Frankfurt am Main and who were stationed at the British military airfield RAF Lakenheath to Ramstein Air Base in Rhineland-Palatinate. From there they should be brought to Afghanistan for use.

Uka first shot a soldier who was about to board the bus, then the bus driver who was sitting at the steering wheel. After Uka boarded the bus, he targeted the US soldiers sitting there. He injured two people in the head and upper body. The only reason why there were no further victims was that the assassin's firearm jammed . Uka had already aimed the gun in the face of a potential fifth victim when the gun failed.

Uka got off the bus and tried to disappear into the crowd inside Airport Terminal 2. However, after being persecuted by two Americans, he was spotted, tracked, and overwhelmed by federal police officers.

trigger

Arid Uka testified that the trigger for his decision to assassinate was a video clip that he saw on the video platform Youtube . In this video clip, the rape of Muslim women by US soldiers was shown. As it turned out in the course of the investigation and the court hearing, it was an excerpt from the American film Redacted , which describes the Mahmudiyya massacre in part fictitiously and in part documentary . Under his pseudonym “Abu Reyyan” (German: “Guardian of the Heavenly Gate”), Uka sought out relevant well-known Islamist discussion forums in which he published his own contributions. Through the content and discussions of the forum, he had come to the firm conviction that his fellow believers and sisters were in a permanent global war with the USA. For Alexander Eisvogel , Vice President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution , Arid Uka is “a typical case of self-radicalization through the Internet”, which takes place independently of traditional religious socialization in Web 2.0 . On the computer and the iPod of the bomber were found hundreds of jihadist files, such as presentations of radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki and a German translation of the book "The defense of the Muslim countries," the mentor of Osama bin Laden applicable Abdallah Azzam . The videos published by Wikileaks of US soldiers shooting civilians in Iraq from a helicopter are also cited as reasons that are said to have intensified the Uka hatred of Americans.

contacts

Arid Uka should contact Sheik Abdellatif from the so-called Da'wa group (Da'wa = Arabic دعوة, DMG daʿwa 'Call, Call (to Islam)'), who previously preached in the Bilal Mosque in Frankfurt-Griesheim and in the Falah Mosque in Frankfurt-Ginnheim and was temporarily arrested on February 22, 2011. At least the Salafist Bilal Mosque is considered a meeting place for Islamists, as several well-known Islamists are said to have frequented the mosque. He is also said to have contacted the Salafist and former rapper Deso Dogg .

process

On February 10, 2012, the Frankfurt am Main Higher Regional Court sentenced Uka to life imprisonment for murder in two cases and attempted murder in three cases. It also found that the guilt was particularly serious , which rules out a release from prison after 15 years. After serving his sentence, Arid Uka is expected to be deported to Kosovo as he is not a German citizen and has been sentenced to a prison term of more than three years. The defendant's lawyer described her client as an atypical violent criminal who was neither a religiously motivated nor an Islamist terrorist. According to her, Uka is “actually a fundamentally good boy”, immature and helpless. The federal prosecutor regards Uka as a lone perpetrator. The highest Hessian court, the higher regional court in Frankfurt am Main, saw the facts as proven. The origin of the weapon could not be clarified in the process. With his judgment of February 10, 2012 , the presiding judge fully complied with the applications of the Federal Prosecutor's Office .

Private background

Arid Uka has lived in Germany since 1991 . The Kosovar grandfather is an imam . The assassin's family, however, is secular and the mother is not veiled . Uka has an older and a younger brother. As a devout Muslim, he is said to have prayed five times a day that while working for the Deutsche Post at Frankfurt Airport, he was asked to refrain from doing this during working hours. He is said to have helped his mother with the household and given her half of his earnings to save this money for a pilgrimage to Mecca . Uka is said to have been sexually abused as a six- or seven-year-old , according to court expert Norbert Leygraf . According to the expert, this fact could have contributed to the fact that the fictional rape video - the film excerpt - was a trigger for his act for Uka. In 2005 he was invited to the Federal Chancellery with his class from the Eduard Spranger School in Frankfurt (secondary school branch) ; The occasion was winning a prize for a project that focused on preventing violence in society. A photo was taken that shows Uka right next to Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder . After graduating from secondary school in 2007, he switched to the Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium . Due to frequent absenteeism, he had to repeat the eleventh grade. After his performance in the twelfth grade had not improved despite several consultations with the rector, Uka left school without a high school diploma or a technical college entrance qualification; a fact that he kept a secret from his family. Relatives, former friends, and a former employer who Uka worked for in the nursing service described him as introverted , polite and non-aggressive. In the months before the attack, he broke off contact with his friends and withdrew in favor of his Internet activities.