German court imprisons Turkish man for 2021 arson attack on synagogue

BERLIN — A German court on Tuesday sentenced a Turkish man to two years and nine months in prison for attempting to set fire to a synagogue in the southern city of Ulm.

The 47-year-old was found guilty of serious arson and damage to property for the incident in June 2021, described by judges at the court in Ulm as an “antisemitism-motivated attack.”

The accused is said to have poured gasoline on a wall of the synagogue and set fire to the fuel.

A police officer intervened before the flames spread, putting the fire out with an extinguisher.

The attack left burn marks on the building and one of its windows covered in soot.

The accused, who lived in Ulm before the attack, fled to Turkey but returned to Germany in July 2023, where he was arrested. The ruling can still be appealed.

Germany has grown increasingly alarmed in recent years about rising anti-Jewish sentiment eight decades after the end of the Holocaust.

A German-Iranian was last year similarly sentenced to two years and nine months in jail for plotting to set fire to a synagogue in Bochum in 2022, a plan made with the backing of Iranian state agencies.

The Israel-Hamas war has further enflamed tensions with German authorities registering a number of antisemitic incidents since the start of the conflict, including the targeting of a Berlin synagogue with Molotov cocktails in October last year.