Six months after surviving a knife attack at the hands of an Islamic jihadist in Mannheim, controversial anti-Islam activist Michael Stürzenberger has been convicted of incitement to hatred over comments made at a 2020 rally.
The Hamburg district court sentenced the 60-year-old to a €3,600 fine, as reported by Berliner Zeitung.
The conviction stems from an October 2020 rally in Hamburg organized by the anti-Islam group Pax Europa Citizens’ Movement, during which Stürzenberger made statements warning of the encroachment of Muslim immigration on Western society. The event, which drew numerous counter-demonstrators, led to legal proceedings for incitement to hatred.
Initially, in 2022, Stürzenberger was sentenced to six months in prison, a decision that was later reduced to a suspended sentence on appeal. However, the case was reopened due to procedural errors, resulting in the latest fine.
Stürzenberger’s conviction comes just months after he was targeted in a knife attack during a May rally in Mannheim. An Afghan assailant stabbed him and murdered 29-year-old police officer Rouven Laur, who was stabbed in the neck.
The Islamist attacker, Sulaiman Ataee, was charged with murder by federal prosecutors in November and remains in custody at an undisclosed location.
The 25-year-old suspect had arrived in Germany back in March 2013 and applied for asylum. His claim was rejected in 2014. Then, after nine years of living in the country illegally, he received a residence permit from German authorities in 2023 due to fathering a child with a German citizen.
The Afghan knifeman in the notorious Mannheim attack ,which has now cost an officer his life, was in Germany illegally for years and years. https://t.co/dvWha4gAQR
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) June 3, 2024At this point, he had already been well on his way to becoming radicalized, having grown a full beard and developed an identity around radical Islam since 2020; he even ran a YouTube channel featuring a Taliban flag in the profile picture and videos of terror preacher Ahmad Zahr Aslamiyar.
After the attack, Stürzenberger remained undeterred in his criticism of political Islam, which he claimed is the “greatest threat to our security and freedom.”
Speaking of the murdered police officer, the Islam critic said, “He was the victim of a brutal, ruthless killer who apparently, due to his ideology, saw the police as his enemy. Because they defend the free, democratic constitutional state that he wants to abolish.”
