Two former soldiers of the Bundeswehr were given suspended sentences on Monday 24 October for having attempted, among other things, under the influence of a “clairvoyant“, to form a group of mercenaries supposed to fight in the civil war in Yemen.
The two men, 61 and 53, were sentenced to eighteen months and fourteen months in prison respectively, the Stuttgart court said in a statement. The Court did not mention their names but had previously identified them as Arend-Adolf Grass and Achim Allweyer.
Sentences commuted to suspended sentence
Their sentences were commuted to suspended sentences, as the duo had already completed a ten-month pre-trial detention. Their full confessions and the absence of a criminal record pleaded in their favour, the court said.
These two former German army paratroopers were arrested in October 2021 while they were busy setting up a “paramilitary unit of 100 to 150 men“, composed mainly of former police officers or soldiers, had then reported the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe, competent for terrorism cases.
They “allowed themselves to be influenced by ideas tinged with Christian fundamentalism as well as the predictions of a Turkish seer“, underlines the court. For them, it was “+pacify+ the civil war zone and force peace negotiations between the Houthi rebels and the Yemeni government», at the cost of murderous acts and civilian casualties.
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The defendants intended to offer their mercenaries a monthly salary of 40,000 euros and had sought, in vain, to contact the Saudi government in the hope of having their project financed. Seven potential recruits had already been contacted when the two men were arrested.
They had worked in the past for the private security company Asgaard, which German media revealed in 2020 was the hub of a vast far-right network. Since 2014, a civil war has seen Houthi rebels, close to Iran, clash with pro-government forces, supported by Saudi Arabia. The conflict has plunged Yemen, the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula, into one of the world’s worst humanitarian tragedies. According to the UN, the war claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
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