Man who planned ricin bomb sent to prison in Germany, cops say bioterror plot thwarted

In Germany, a court sentenced a 31-year-old Tunisian man to 10 years in prison for planning a biological bomb attack with the deadly poison ricin, which is isolated from the seeds of the castor bean plant.

He is said to have ordered the beans online. One can isolate a lethal amount of ricin from them, under the right circumstances.

The sentence was issued last Thursday, March 26, 2020. The arrests are believed to have prevented what would have been Germany's first biological attack, said police in Munich.

Sief Allah H., 31, was found guilty of producing a biological weapon and of planning a serious act of violent subversion.

From AFP:

An Islamic State sympathizer, the perpetrator had ordered castor seeds and explosives on the internet in order to build the toxic bomb, a spokesman for the higher regional court in Duesseldorf said.

(...) His German wife, 43, stands accused of helping him build the bomb, but she is now being tried separately after the court accused her defense lawyers of attempting to spin out the case with a 140-page statement on Thursday [26 Mar 2020]. Her trial will resume on 1 Apr 2020.

The couple "wanted to create a climate of fear and uncertainty among the German population," Judge Jan van Lessen was quoted by DPA as saying on Thursday [26 Mar 2020]. He added that they had produced enough ricin to potentially kill up to 13 500 people.

The couple have been on trial since June last year [2019] following their arrest in 2018 by an anti-terrorist squad that found 84 milligrams of the toxin in their Cologne apartment.