A 25-year-old Afghan refugee who deliberately crashed his car into a crowd of people on a street in Munich in 2025, killing two people and wounding dozens more, was sentenced on Thursday to life in prison.
The judges at a court in Munich said that the man had been motivated by religious extremism and ruled that he would not automatically be eligible for parole after 15 years, as is normally the case with life sentences in Germany.
The sentence comes as a series of unconnected attacks carried out by men with migrant backgrounds have shaken Germans’ sense of public safety and helped turn public opinion against refugees, ultimately boosting the country’s far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party.
The latest such attack was last month, when a German citizen of Lebanese descent with a history of criminal convictions and terrorist aspirations rammed a van into revelers leaving a gay Pride celebration in Berlin, killing one woman and injuring 29 other people.
In June, a court in Magdeburg handed down a life sentence to a Saudi-born psychologist who had plowed a rental car into a Christmas market in December 2024, killing six and wounding hundreds.
The assailant in the Munich attack, whom authorities have identified only as Farhad N. in keeping with German privacy rules, drove his white Mini Cooper into a marching crowd of around 1,400 trade union supporters. Police officers who were already on the scene because they were accompanying the march quickly arrested the man. Over 40 people were seriously wounded, and a woman and her 2-year-old daughter died days later in the hospital.
Farhad N.’s asylum claim had been rejected in 2020, but he was allowed to stay and work in Germany because it was considered too dangerous to deport him to Afghanistan, which is controlled by the Taliban, according to investigations by Der Spiegel, a German news outlet.
On the surface, the man appeared integrated into German society. He worked as a security guard and had thousands of followers on Instagram, where he was a fitness influencer. But in their ruling, the judges said that he held an extremist religious worldview that motivated his attack.
“The defendant intended to perform an act pleasing to God and to prove himself to be a good Muslim in the eyes of Allah, himself and his family,” Michael Höhne, the lead judge, said as he read out the sentence on Thursday.
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