A German court on Tuesday found a man who drove onto the tarmac at Hamburg airport last year with his 4-year-old daughter and was arrested after an 18-hour standoff guilty of hostage-taking and other charges. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison, AP News reports.
A Hamburg court also found the 35-year-old defendant, whose name was withheld under confidentiality rules, guilty of kidnapping a child, intentional bodily harm and possession of ammunition, German news agency dpa reported.
The incident took place on the evening of November 4. Witnesses reported that the accused, a Turkish national, burst through the airport gate, fired shots into the air and threw two incendiary devices from a rented car before firing into the air and parking the car under an aircraft near the airport terminal building.
He took his daughter from her mother in Stade, 52 kilometres (32 miles) from Hamburg, in an ongoing custody battle. Prosecutors said he demanded a plane to fly with his daughter to Turkey and threatened to blow himself up with the child. An apparent explosive belt later turned out to be fake.
The standoff caused flights at the airport to be suspended for more than 20 hours. There are no formal plea bargains in the German court system, but the dpa news agency reported that the defendant had generally admitted to the charges against him. Presiding judge Torsten Schwarz called his actions “an act of madness”.
