AARHUS – A Danish judge jailed a Somali Islamist for nine years and told him that he would then be kicked back to his homeland Friday for trying to butcher a cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH). A day after Mohamed Geele was found guilty of attempted murder and terrorism for a New Year’s Day axe attack, judge Ingrid Thorsboe disregarded his plea to be spared expulsion back to war-torn Somalia after his time behind bars.
“Mohamed Geele is sentenced to nine years in prison and expulsion from Denmark for life,” after he completes his sentence, Thorsboe told the court in the central Danish city of Aarhus said. Geele’s legal team immediately announced that they would appeal. A jury at the district court had convicted Geele, 29, on Thursday at the end of a trial which had gripped Denmark. During the trial, the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard recounted how he feared he was going to die after Geele broke into his home, and was only able to survive by locking himself inside a special panic room from where he alerted police.
The prosecution had requested Geele serve 12 years in prison before being deported and banned from ever returning to Denmark, but on Friday lead prosecutor Kirsten Dyrman said she was satisfied with the verdict. “That he received three years less in prison than I asked for was due to the fact that Kurt Westergaard was not physically harmed” in the attack, she said. Geele’s lawyer Niels Strauss, who had asked that his client receive no more than six years in prison and not be expelled, meanwhile immediately appealed the verdict and sentence.
He demanded “the acquittal of (his) client for charges of terrorism, and that extenuating circumstances (be considered) for the other charges.” Strauss maintained that an attack against a single person could not be qualified as terrorism, while Geele, a father of four, told the court his life would be in danger if he were deported to Somalia. The Somali broke into 75-year-old Westergaard’s home last year wielding an axe and screaming, “You must die! You are going to Hell!”, according to the cartoonist’s testimony in court last month.
Westergaard said he escaped “certain death” by rushing into a bathroom-turned-panic-room to call police. When officers arrived, Geele, who is suspected of having links to the Somali Islamist movement Al-Shebab, came out wielding his axe and a knife. He was shot twice and placed under arrest. In court, Geele said repeatedly he was only trying to frighten the cartoonist to get him to stop “dirtying” the prophet.
