More than a month after a German court convicted a 31-year-old Tunisian man of planning to carry out a ricin attack, his German wife who is accused of helping him, denied the charges on Friday.
In late March, the Dusseldorf regional court found Sief Allah H. guilty of manufacturing a biological weapon and preparing an attack, sentencing him to 10 years in prison.
His 44-year-old wife denied plotting with her husband to carry out a biological bomb attack with the deadly poison ricin.
She also said that she didn’t know the dangers posed by ricin that was stored at their apartment in Cologne, and that she would not let the toxic material be near her seven children.
Federal prosecutors said the couple decided in 2017 to detonate an explosive in a large crowd.
The pair had allegedly researched various forms of explosives before deciding on the deadly poison.
They ordered 3,300 castor beans over the internet and successfully made a small amount of ricin.
They also bought a hamster to test the potency of the poison.
The couple were caught in June 2018 after a tip-off from the US Central Intelligence Agency, which had noticed the large online purchase of castor seeds.
Before travelling to Germany, Sief Allah H. worked as a mailman in Tunisia.
He had tried to travel to Syria to fight alongside extremists. But when he failed to go there, he thought about an alternative plan to carry out the biological attack.
In another case, the Dusseldorf regional court sentenced Carla-Josephine S., a 33-year-old German woman, to five years and three months in prison, for taking her three children to Syria in 2015 without the knowledge or consent of their father.
The eldest son, trained as a child soldier aged 7, is thought to have died in a 2018 rocket attack.
She had also joined a women's ISIS unit in Syria.
