Stephan Balliet, the author of the anti-Semitic attack in Halle in 2019, was sentenced to life imprisonment at a Naumburg court on Monday.
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The ruling classifies this 28-year-old German as a "danger" to society and removes the option of conditional freedom during his sentence. This means that the sentence amounts to at least 15 years in prison for Balliet.
Contrary to what his defenders argued, a psychiatric expert report determined that the accused is of full mental faculties and could be prosecuted.
The Attorney General's Office considered that Balliet planned a murderous attack guided by his "anti-Semitic, racist, and xenophobic ideology."
On October 9, 2019, this heavily armed far-right man tried to break into the Halle synagogue, where over 50 Jews were celebrating Yom Kippur, which is the holiest day of the year in Judaism.
Since he couldn't get in because the door was locked from the inside, he started shooting randomly through downtown Halle. He killed a woman near the synagogue and a man in a Turkish restaurant. Besides posting a xenophobic manifesto on the Internet, Balliet broadcast the attack live on Twitch.
During the trial, the accusers were represented by 23 lawyers who summoned 79 witnesses, 15 experts, and 45 survivors and relatives of the deceased.