A 17-year-old girl from Denmark faces a lifetime behind bars after being found guilty of attempting a terrorist act on two schools. She purchased ingredients for a homemade bomb and established contact with jihadists after recently converting to Islam.
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The convicted, known only as "Kundby Girl" in the media, had planned the attack on her own former school in the province of Zeeland, and on a Jewish college in Copenhagen. The girl, who was 15 at the time of her arrest in January last year, following a tip-off from her family, was found to have purchased “a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a bottle of citric acid, a bottle of acetone” at a cosmetics store to produce high explosive acetone peroxide (TATP), though had not yet succeeded in making a functional explosive.
"Right now it seems Islamism is her everything. As long as that's the case, then I think she's dangerous," prosecutor Kristian Kirk told the court in Holbaek, as cited by Politiken, while the accused remained impassive.
Noting that the country’s legal system has never encountered a similar case, the prosecutor is demanding indefinite detention at a mental institution, with sentencing scheduled for Wednesday.
While the Kundby Girl had pleaded innocent, prosecutors successfully proved that her intentions had not changed in custody, while her testimony remained “unreliable.” She assaulted a guard because he had previously served as part of the NATO force in Iraq, and had written to an imprisoned Islamic State terrorist, saying that she had stopped wearing Islamic headdress to avoid attracting scrutiny, but had not renounced jihad.
Even more glaringly, the girl reportedly wrote a partly biographical fictional story while in custody, in which she fantasized of being a jihadist planning terrorist attacks, The Local.dk reported.
The defense team presented Kundby Girl as a young victim of circumstance, plagued by psychological troubles. Social services were concerned about her when she was as young as two, and the would-be bomber had been bullied while at school, self-harming and suffering from low self-esteem.
Lawyers said that her radicalization took a matter of months, and that she had wanted to feel “excited” and to draw attention to herself. They also noted that she had not set a concrete date for her attack, as she did not reportedly receive an order from the jihadist figureheads she had written to on Twitter.
“She is very, very distraught by the verdict,” said lawyer Mette Gritt Stage, who had asked the judge to impose a sentence of six to eight years.
Kundby Girl is said to be a recent Muslim convert, adopting Islam, or a radical interpretation thereof, in 2015. Reports indicate that around the same time the girl abruptly switched her interests and lifestyle.