A Hamburg court sentenced a Danish man to eight and a half years in prison on Thursday for preparing murders ordered from Tehran, AFP reported. The target list included Volker Beck, president of the German-Israeli Society, and Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
The defendant, identified only as Ali Hassan S., did not act alone. An Afghan national, Tawab M., was given four and a half years. Prosecutors said Tawab M. had agreed to find another person to carry out the attack on Beck and to hand that person a weapon.
Presiding judge Petra Wende-Spors left little room for doubt about who stood behind the plan. She called it “terrorist activities orchestrated by Iran,” and said the Danish defendant had been preparing a contract killing “for purely political reasons.”
Orders from the Quds Force
According to the prosecution, Ali Hassan S. began taking instructions in early 2025 from the Quds Force, the overseas operations arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Besides preparing the attacks on the two public figures, he also watched a Jewish-owned grocery store in Berlin, prosecutors said.
Both men were arrested in Denmark last year and extradited to Germany for trial.
The case has already cost Berlin and Tehran some goodwill. In July last year, after the Danish suspect was arrested, Germany’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador to protest the suspected role of Iranian intelligence services.
Iran denies any part in the plot. When German prosecutors filed charges against the two men, the Iranian Embassy in Berlin dismissed the accusations as “unfounded allegations made at the behest of Iran’s enemies.”
