Suspect admits killing US airmen at German airport
By DAVID McHUGH, Associated Press
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — A Kosovo Albanian man confessed Wednesday to killing two U.S. airmen at the Frankfurt airport, saying in emotional testimony at the opening of his trial that he had been influenced by radical Islamic propaganda online.
Arid Uka, 21, is charged with two counts of murder for the March 2 slaying of Senior Airman Nicholas J. Alden, 25, from South Carolina, and Airman 1st Class Zachary R. Cuddeback, 21, from Virginia. He also faces three counts of attempted murder in connection with the wounding of two others.
Although Germany has experienced scores of terrorist attacks in past decades, largely from leftist groups like the Red Army Faction, the airport attack was the first attributed to an Islamic extremist.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, there have been about a half-dozen other jihadist plots that were either thwarted or failed — including a 2007 plan to kill Americans at the U.S. Air Force's Ramstein Air Base.
Uka went to the airport with the intent "to kill an indeterminate number of American soldiers, but if possible a large number," prosecutor Herbert Deimer told a state court in Frankfurt.
No pleas are entered in the German system, and Uka confessed to the killings after the indictment was read, telling the court "what I did was wrong but I cannot undo what I did." He went on to urge other radical Muslims not to seek inspiration in his attack, urging them not to be taken in by "lying propaganda" on the Internet.
"To this day I try to understand what happened and why I did it... but I don't understand," he said.
Cooperating with authorities and confessing to a crime can help reduce a defendant's sentence — but Uka refused to tell the court where he obtained the gun used in the crime, which Presiding Judge Thomas Sagebiel said meant his confession was not complete.
Uka described becoming increasingly introverted in the months before the attack, staying at home and playing computer games and watching Islamic extremist propaganda on the Internet.
The night before the crime, Uka said that he followed a link to a video posted on Facebook that purported to show American soldiers raping a teenage Muslim girl. It turned out to be a scene from the 2007 anti-war Brian De Palma film "Redacted," taken out of context.
He said he then decided he should do anything possible to prevent more American soldiers from going to Afghanistan.
"I thought what I saw in that video, these people would do in Afghanistan," he told the court, his voice choking with emotion as he wiped away tears.
Uka conceded when asked by prosecutor Jochen Weingarten that the airman driving the bus had not been going to Afghanistan. On the bus on the way to the airport to look for victims, he said he listened to Islamic music on his iPod while nursing doubts that he'd be able to follow through with his plan.
"On the one hand I wanted to do something to help the women, and on the other hand I hoped I would not see any soldiers," he told the court.
Six months later, he says he now does not understand why he went through with the killings.
"If you ask me why I did this, I can only say ... I don't understand anymore how I went that far."
The indictment says Uka went to the airport armed with a pistol, extra ammunition and two knives. Inside Terminal 2, he spotted two U.S. servicemen who had just arrived and followed them to their U.S. Air Force bus.
After 16 servicemen, including the driver, were on or near the bus, Uka approached one of the men for a cigarette, prosecutors said. He confirmed they were U.S. Air Force members en route to Afghanistan, then "turned around, put the magazine that had been concealed in his backpack into his pistol, and cocked the weapon," the indictment read.
He first shot unarmed Alden in the back of the head, the indictment alleged. He then boarded the vehicle shouting "Allahu Akbar" — Arabic for "God is great" — and shot and killed Cuddeback, who was the driver, before firing at others.
He wounded two others — one victim has lost sight in one eye permanently — before his gun jammed and he fled, prosecutors said. The shooter was then chased down and caught.
Some of the American airmen are expected to testify at the trial. At least one relative of the victims — Cuddeback's mother — has joined the trial as a co-plaintiff.
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Comment—by Bill Purcell
It is difficult to regard these murders as acts attributable to fundamentalism alone, or to the pathology of fundamentalism, or to the pathology of one culture as opposed to another. The hyper modern context seems crucial here, especially the presence of multiple, operationalized or virtual fantasies that are subject to continuous splicing and recontextualization. Where does the violence begin? Does it even have a beginning? Or is it a supreme obsession, saturating each interstice of this murderous event? Everything is virtual. The fundamentalist propaganda was actually spliced from a film intended to decry the Western thirst for war.
The Uka who is present in the German court nearly 6 months after the murders presents himself not as a fundamentalist soldier, but as an inexplicable subjectivity in a quasi-state of remorse and rehabilitation. He speaks of himself with an extreme form of objectivity, as if his dual nature reflected simultaneously his possession by and as an avatar of some evilly intelligent game. And indeed he was capable of encasing himself digitally in a refractive shell permeated by violence and the constructed identity of ideology. Against the pervasive global deconstruction, this shell maintained a kind of integrity, like a hazmat suit. An avatar has no interior aside from the hidden code of the game itself. The genius of the game’s code is simultaneously the illusion of the game environment by which it secretes itself, and its total hegemonic presence within each pixel of the game screen.
The difficulty for us in the West is that this evilly intelligent game has replaced our fading and now deconstructed notion of an absolute reality. Which is to say that we are no longer wholly contained by an ultimate real. We have been released. By our own desires we have accomplished the impossible. We have released ourselves from reality. Yet what ever is left outside of ourselves races to contain us. Instead of the symbolic position of submission to the real, which was always an oppression to our desires and our fantasies and as such became the negative form of our fantasies, we are released to the now larger and more absolute world of an intelligent game. It confounds us with the infinite reflection of evil, which we had once hoped would prove to be an empty form. We race against emptiness. We race against an empty intelligence that cannot be beaten to any location within the game because it is always already there.
