The Path of a Young German Salafist

From Der Spiegel:

By Julia Jüttner, Solingen

Photo Gallery: Islam and the German Boy

Photos

Robert B. wore long robes, dreamed of paradise and called himself Abdul Hakiim. He and his friend were arrested in July for trying to enter Britain with bomb-making guides and al-Qaida propaganda. They now sit in a London high-security prison. But Robert’s motivations remain a mystery.

A mother can’t be fooled, and a mother notices when her child goes astray, says Marlies B. That’s why she called the state authorities in October 2010 and asked if she needed to be worried about her son.

Her son Robert had changed. He’d converted to Islam, forsaken pork and alcohol, and now he wore a knit wool cap and wandered the city of Solingen, northeast of Cologne, in floor-length garments. Marlies B. says she’d never seen him this way. People asked her about it, and it was embarrassing. It frightened her.

At the end of July — after a period when she couldn’t reach him, either on his cell phone or at his apartment — she printed out a statement from his bank account. (Robert had given her notarized power of attorney years before.) She noticed a flight booked for €447 ($647), and “all of my alarm bells went off,” she says. She drove to a national-security office in Wuppertal.

“You’re son is doing well,” an official told her, asking her to take a seat in the hall. Marlies B. had an uneasy feeling. A mother knows, she says. Two other officials came upstairs. They had just searched Robert’s apartment, and they told her that her son had been in a London prison since July 15.

Al-Qaida Propaganda

He’d taken the ferry to Dover with Christian E., another convert from Solingen, who had a criminal record. At the border they told authorities they had planned to fly from Brussels to Egypt, but the tickets were too expensive. So they’d settled on Great Britain instead.

Officials searched their bags and found handbooks for jihadists, a bomb-making pamphlet called, “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” and an essay on “39 Ways to Support Jihad,” written by the radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki — all propaganda material for al-Qaida. Both Germans were sent to Belmarsh, a high-security prison in south London, and isolated in solitary confinement.

“I fear that the English justice system will crack down like it did in the recent riots, and we want to prevent that,” says Robert’s attorney, Burkhard Benecken. His client faces up to 10 years in prison. But under German law his actions were not punishable. This week, Benecken and Robert’s mother are flying to London; it will be her first visit with her son since he was arrested.

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Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

9 Replies to “The Path of a Young German Salafist”

  1. I’m English and I would be only too pleased to see these bastards strung up. Unfortunately we no longer have capital punishishment over here and so we will just have to settle for these two being banged up for a few years. It’s a pity that we can’t bang up all those faceless wonders who brought about the mass invasion by Islam to the West at the same time.

  2. tc72; “It’s a pity that we can’t bang up all those faceless wonders who brought about the mass invasion by Islam to the West at the same time.”

    vote BNP and you might get the chance 🙂

  3. May I suggest that the German authorities arrest two English Jihadist and give them a 50 year prison sentence as an answer to the English authorities treatment of the German Jihadist.

  4. It must be very sad for a parent to find out that a child had gone the wrong way. But for the mother fortunately her child is in jail now. That could be a first step in becoming human again.

  5. Maybe she should have baptized him as a child and given him a Christian value system and faith, rather than letting chance take its way, as she suggests in the article. People abandon a life-affirming faith, and expect healthy lives–

  6. Welcome to the future, the left worked hard, and is still working hard to destroy Christianity. This has left the former believers and their children open to be recruited/converted to any and all new age religions as well as several old ones. Now we are all paying the price for the left working to create their mythical socialist paradise.