After almost 14 months, the trial against Franco A. at the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court has come to an end: The state security senate sentenced the officer in the Bundeswehr to five and a half years in prison for preparing a serious act of violence that endangered the state and other crimes.
In doing so, the court largely complied with the prosecution's demand - to mitigate the sentence, it asserted, among other things, the burden that the accused and his family had experienced through reports in some media.
The presiding judge Christoph Koller explicitly mentioned the AStA newspaper of the Goethe University in the verdict on Friday.
Matthew Trautsch
Coordination report Rhein-Main.
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The student publication gave the full name and address of the defendant, who lived in Offenbach, as well as his motorcycle license plate number.
She also asked the readers to show A. "what you think of him and his inhuman world view".
A., who grew up in Offenbach and went to school in Frankfurt, had enrolled as a law student at Goethe University during the trial.
According to the court, the article also led to hostilities at the family's place of residence.
Koller also criticized the judiciary: The length of the process, which lasted more than five years from the first arrest to the verdict, violated the rights of the accused.
He accused the authorities of not properly checking the identity of the Bundeswehr officer when he registered as a Syrian refugee in 2015 and thus obtained benefits as an asylum seeker by fraud.