Germany: Accused jihadists to plead guilty; one defendant says trial is "boring"

Shrewd move. This allows the terrorists to keep the evidence from the public and will give them an opportunity to make a grandstand play for sympathy. Muslims and dhimmi apologists will make political hay from the situation. In essence, they have shifted from physical terror to political activism, and the courts are their unwitting dupes. Once incarcerated, they will become prime recruiters for Islamic terror attacks on the West. They need to be held in strict isolation for the rest of their miserable lives.

FROM JIHADWATCH.ORG:

Germany: Accused jihadists to plead guilty; one defendant says trial is "boring"

Adem Yilmaz, the bored one, previously refused to stand according to custom for this non-Islamic court, saying "I only stand up for Allah." In that light, his "boredom" likely also stems from his unwillingness to acknowledge the court's authority. No word on whether it has occurred to him that if "boredom" is an issue for him, there's plenty more where that came from once the sentence is handed down. "German Terrorism Suspects to Plead Guilty,"
by Nicholas Kulish for the New York Times,

June 9 (thanks to Sr. Soph):
BERLIN — The defendants in Germany’s largest terrorism case in a generation announced in a Düsseldorf courtroom on Tuesday that they were ready to confess to plotting a series of deadly bombings.
The trial was expected to last two years and had been billed as the biggest terrorism case since leaders of the far-left Red Army Faction were prosecuted in the 1970s. But on just the 15th day of the proceedings, the accused abruptly shifted tactics.

The four defendants notified the court on Tuesday that they planned to change their pleas to guilty, a court official and defense lawyers said, although the change will not be official until the trial resumes in two weeks.
German authorities arrested three of the suspects in September 2007 with 26 military detonators and 12 drums of hydrogen peroxide, more explosive material than was used in the 2004 bombings of commuter trains in Madrid. The fourth man was arrested a few months later in Turkey.

German security officials said the suspects had visited terrorist training camps in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. They are accused of being members of the Islamic Jihad Union, a radical group based in Central Asia with roots in Uzbekistan. The four men are accused of planning attacks against a list of targets, including the airport in Frankfurt and Ramstein Air Base, an American installation in Germany.

The men have been held without bail.

The change of heart by the defendants, known in Germany as the Sauerland Cell after the region where they were arrested, was a testament to the more than 500 file folders of evidence gathered by the police and the case put together by prosecutors, defense lawyers said. Prosecutors had begun to lay out that case in court since the trial opened in April.
Yet the decisive twist in this case may have hinged at least in part on simple boredom.

“I couldn’t care less how long you give me, whether it’s 20 or 30 years,” Adem Yilmaz, a Turkish man raised in Germany, declared in open court on Tuesday, according to the German news agency dpa. “I just want to get what we’re doing here over and done with. It’s boring.”

After Mr. Yilmaz announced his intention to confess, the presiding judge, Ottmar Breidling, had plain words of his own for him and the other defendants, telling them that it was time to come clean and stop playing games. “All cards on the table out in the open and not marked,” Judge Breidling said.
The trial recessed so the four accused men could meet privately with one another, under guard but without lawyers present, said Ulrich Egger, a spokesman for the court. Afterward, the four men informed the court of their plans to plead guilty.

The trial is set to resume on June 23.