A 14-year-old Austrian schoolboy who downloaded bomb-making plans on his PlayStation has been sentenced to eight months in prison and a further suspended jail sentence of 16 months after pleading guilty of terrorism charges.
A regional court in St.Polter - state capital of Lower Austria -convicted defendant Mertkan G., a Turkish-born teen living in Austria for eight years, for his plans to join Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria with the intension to bomb a Vienna train station, DPA news agency reported.
"In addition, he is suspected of obtaining instructions on how to make an explosive device from an Al-Qaeda website ... in order to carry out an attack in Vienna," the court ruled, according to AFP.
The prosecution attorney, Michael Lindenbauer, said the boy was living with his mother after his parents divorced. He further added that boy has not shown remorse over his action, Xinhua news agency reported. Although raised in the Turkish Alevi Islamic branch, Mertkan G. drifted towards Sunni Islam and subsequently attracted toward the Islamic State.
His defense attorney, Rudolf Meyer, said the boy had only been "playing with the idea" of making a bomb, Euronews reported. "It's due to being socially excluded to a certain extent being discriminated against. If Western countries don't see that money needs to be spent to fight radicalization, it won't just be him, but thousands of other youths," Meyer told reporters when asked about reason behind boy's radicalization.
The teenage boy, arrested in October 2014, confessed that he had contacted Islamic State liaisons in Vienna last year and had told them he would bomb a Vienna train station before joining IS fighters in Syria, DPA reported.
In another case, a Vienna court on Tuesday acquitted a 16-year-old girl accused of being supporter of Islamic State, according to DW. According to the Austrian interior ministry, around 200 Austrian citizens have joined ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq.
