SUSPECTED IS CHIEF IN GERMANY GETS LONG PRISON SENTENCE

Abu Walaa, an Iraqi preacher accused of being the head of Islamic State in Germany, was sentenced on Wednesday to 10-and-a-half years in prison, in a trial against a network of recruiters for foreign Islamist fighters, Michael Evers and Rachel More reported for Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa).

A court in the northern German town of Celle found the 37-year-old guilty of supporting terrorism and membership of a terrorist organization. Abu Walaa was an imam at an infamous mosque in the city of Hildesheim that attracted Islamists from across Germany but has since been shut down by authorities.

He and his associates recruited young people predominantly from north-western Germany to defend the terrorist militia's caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Three co-defendants in the trial were given custodial sentences of between around four and eight years.

One of them, a German-Serbian man who got an eight-year term, provided his flat in the city of Dortmund as a space for prayer, judges found.

He also provided lodgings there to Anis Amri, an Islamist terrorist who would go on to commit the Berlin Christmas market attack in December 2016, in which 12 people were killed.

Two of the men's Islamic State recruits were said to have carried out suicide bombings in Iraq in which several people were killed. Federal prosecutors had sought an 11-and-a-half-year sentence for Abu Walaa and sentences of between four-and-a-half and 10 years for the other three.

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