FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A Kosovo-Albanian man who killed two U.S. airmen and wounded two others in a gun attack at Frankfurt airport last March was sentenced to life in prison by German court on Friday.His defense is trying to get cute:
Arid Uka, a 22-year-old who was raised in Germany, had confessed to the attack and said he acted after seeing a video apparently showing U.S. soldiers raping Muslim women.
Wearing a black hooded top, he smiled when police removed the handcuffs after bringing him into the Frankfurt courtroom, then sat with eyes downcast as Judge Thomas Sagebiel read out a detailed chronology of the attack.
"Yes, this is indeed the first Islamic-motivated terror strike to have happened in Germany," the judge said.
The court in Germany's financial capital heard how the gunman walked up to airmen boarding a U.S. Army bus and asked one of them for a cigarette.
After establishing that they were heading to Afghanistan, Uka shot a 25-year-old man in the back of the head, killing him, according to prosecutors.
He then boarded the bus, shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is Greatest) and shot dead a 21-year-old airman sitting in the driver's seat. He wounded two others and pulled the trigger on a fifth target when his gun jammed.
Uka's defense counsel Jens Joerg Hoffmann said after he was found guilty that he would appeal against the sentence within a week.This so-called rage is called the Koran-mandated jihadist attack.
"We have to appeal," Hoffmann told Reuters. "We think it was not a jihadist attack, it was rage. He ran amok."
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