Danish girl convicted of plotting bomb attacks on schools
COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- A Danish court on Tuesday convicted a teenage girl of attempted terrorism for planning bomb attacks against two schools.
Holbaek District Court judge Peder Christensen says the 17-year-old, who wasn't identified, was also convicted of assaulting an employee in the juvenile incarceration facility where she had been held during the trial.
Christensen said the girl had converted to Islam and intended to carry out attacks, including one on a Jewish school, when she was 15. He said she possessed chemicals to make the explosive known as TATP. It also appeared she had online contacts with radical militants.
The teenager was arrested Jan. 13, 2016. The court said the bombings were not carried out because she was arrested before she could take action, and that she had not received any orders to blow up her former school, Holbaek, 40 miles northwest of Copenhagen, and Copenhagen's Jewish Caroline School.
Her lawyer, Mette Gritt Stage, had said her client had been bullied at school and is a confused teenager seeking attention.
After the guilty ruling, Stage said her client "was very, very saddened."
Three letters were found in her cell in late April and read in court. In one, the teenager wrote that she deliberately didn't wear a headscarf "to fool the disbelievers" to think she had not converted to Islam.
In another letter to a Danish-Turkish man who had been sentenced to six years in prison and had his Danish citizenship stripped off for joining radical ISIS militants in Syria, she wrote that she stabbed the employee in the incarceration facility because he had been a soldier in Iraq, adding "I couldn't accept this."
The court is expected to announce sentencing on Thursday. Prosecutors are requesting her incarceration at a mental institution.