A citizen of Turkish and Swiss nationality was sentenced this Tuesday to 20 years in prison by the Federal Criminal Court of Bellinzona, Switzerland, for the murder in 2020 of a Portuguese man in Morges, Switzerland, the first linked to Islamic fundamentalism tried in this country.
Omer A., 29, who admitted sympathy for the Islamic State group and said he carried out the attack to “revenge” the international war against the terrorist organization, received an even higher sentence than the prosecutor requested. , who had requested 18 years in prison, reported the Tribune de Genéve newspaper, quoted by the EFE news agency.
The murder took place on September 12, 2020 in a restaurant in Morges, a town on the shores of Lake Geneva near Lausanne, when the assailant randomly chose a victim, a Portuguese citizen, and stabbed him in the back, after screaming ” Allah is Great.”
The victim, a Portuguese man who was 29 years old at the time of the crime, had recently lived in the region, where he worked picking apples.
The Portuguese was waiting his turn in line at a kebab restaurant when, for no apparent reason, he was attacked by the convicted man. At the time of the crime, the victim was accompanied by his girlfriend and friends, who witnessed the attack.
The convicted man, who has suffered from schizophrenia since he was a teenager, has already served 15 months in prison for the attempted fire at a gas station in 2019, and while in custody he violently assaulted two members of the security forces (an official police officer and a prisoner, who stabbed him with a pen).
The trial was held last December and the psychiatric experts concluded that the defendant’s schizophrenic problems could be a mitigating factor, although he has refused to receive psychiatric treatment, which will be replaced by other therapies.
The convict, who worked as a painter’s apprentice, admitted to having begun to become radicalized in 2016, although he said that he never swore allegiance to the Islamic State, and stated that after his time in prison he had lost “all interest in the holy war”. . .
Source: TSF
