'Veil martyr' murderer gets life sentence

A Russian-born German man has been sentenced to life behind bars for the brutal murder of a pregnant headscarved Egyptian woman inside a courtroom.

Alex Wiens, 28, much of his face covered by a hooded top, sat motionless as the court in the eastern German city of Dresden found him guilty of murdering Marwa El-Sherbini, dubbed the "veil martyr".

On July 1, in the same courthouse, Wiens had plunged an 18cm kitchen knife at least 16 times into Sherbini, 31, and three-months pregnant at the time with her second child.

Her son, three-year-old Mustafa, watched her bleed to death at the scene.

Sherbini's husband, Egyptian geneticist Elwy Okaz, rushed to her aid but was also stabbed repeatedly and then shot in the leg by a police officer who was unsure who was the attacker.

Wiens ad been in court for slandering Sherbini after a nasty confrontation in a children's playground in 2008.

Wiens called her a "terrorist", "Islamist" and "whore". She pressed charges for verbal abuse and he was fined.

He appealed the conviction, bringing them together again on July 1 this year — a day that ended in tragedy.

Wiens, surrounded by four security guards as today's verdict was read, was also found guilty of attempted murder and causing bodily harm for his attack on Sherbini's husband.

"He killed Marwa not of dread or fear but out of revenge," judge Birgit Wiegand said. "He deliberately profited from her innocence and her defencelessness."

Throughout his trial, which began under heavy security on October 26, Wiens had been uncooperative, refusing to remove his sunglasses, banging his head on the table and stamping his feet during proceedings.

After the verdict, Wiens, an ethnic German who arrived in Germany from Perm in the Urals in 2003, was handcuffed and led away, saying nothing, with his head bowed.

The killing, as well as a slow reaction from Germany's politicians and media, sparked outrage in Sherbini's home country, as well as in the wider Muslim world.

In Tehran, protestors hurled eggs at the German embassy and daubed "Angie the Nazi" on walls, referring to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.

Egyptian ambassador to Germany, Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy, welcomed the verdict on Wednesday, telling AFP in Dresden: "The judgement says it all. The right sentence was delivered today and justice has been honoured."

"Getting the maximum possible sentence, I think that itself says a lot. I think that should satisfy the family and the people," he said.

On crutches, unsure if he will ever walk again, Okaz gave wrenching testimony during the just over two-week-long trial, telling the court how Mustafa, who now lives with family in Egypt, misses his mother.

The trial centred around Wiens' motives for the murder and whether he was fully in control of his faculties at the time.

Prosecutors said he was driven by "an unbridled hatred of foreigners." In a statement read by his lawyer, Wiens admitted being hostile to foreigners but denied this was the motive for the attack.

Wiens "voted NPD (a neo-Nazi party) because he said it was the only party that would ensure that Germany would be free of foreigners," the judge said.

In a last-minute twist, a document suddenly arrived from Russia showing that Wiens had been declared unfit for military service in 2001 because of schizophrenia.

Defence lawyers said that the stabbing had not been premeditated, that Wiens always carried a knife in his backpack, and that his psychiatric condition mitigated the crime.

The courthouse, lightly guarded when the murder took place, now resembled a maximum security prison, with some 200 police officers and snipers on hand, following death threats against Wiens, who was shielded by bulletproof glass.

Outside the courtroom, around 200 people, most of them Muslims, staged a demonstration calling for the government to do more to counter racism, particularly on the Internet.

"History, which we Germans should have learned better than anyone, has shown us where propaganda aimed against religious minorities can lead," said Muhamed Ciftci, a spokesman for the organisers.