A Danish court has sentenced a teenage girl to six years in jail, two days after she was found guilty of attempted terrorism by planning bomb attacks against two schools when she was 15. She was also convicted of assaulting an employee in the juvenile incarceration facility where she had been held during the trial.
Holbaek District Court judge Peder Christensen said Thursday that Natascha Colding-Olsen, now 17, had converted to Islam in 2015, intended to carry out attacks including on a Jewish school, and possessed chemicals.
During the trial at the court northwest of Copenhagen, she admitted making contact with people whom she thought were radical militants.
The teenager was arrested January 13, 2016. The court said the bombings were not carried out because she was arrested before she could take action, and that she had not received any orders to blow up her former school, Holbaek, 65 kilometers northwest of Copenhagen, and Copenhagen’s Jewish Caroline School.
Her lawyer, Mette Gritt Stage, had said her client had been bullied at school and is a confused teenager seeking attention.
Three letters were found in her cell in late April and read in court. In one, the teenager wrote that she deliberately didn’t wear a headscarf “to fool the disbelievers” to think she had not converted to Islam.
In another letter to a Danish-Turkish man who had been sentenced to six years in prison and had his Danish citizenship stripped off for joining radical Islamic State militants in Syria, she wrote that she stabbed the employee in the incarceration facility because he had been a soldier in Iraq, adding “I couldn’t accept this.”
She was convicted on Tuesday. Prosecutors had demanded her incarceration at a mental institution, but the judge said he didn’t find a “fully adequate basis” for doing that.
