From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 8/3/2006 2:30 AM Russian court convicts 5 Muslim teens of planning terrorist attacks Wednesday August 02, 2006
MOSCOW (AP) Five Muslim teenagers were convicted Wednesday of involvement in a terrorist conspiracy and sentenced to prison terms of up to six years, the father of one of the teens said.
The teenagers, along with 19 adults, were accused of plotting to create an Islamic state in the traditionally Muslim region of Tartarstan, about 450 miles east of Moscow.
But rights activists and relatives said the trial, which began last month in the central Russian city of Kazan, was an attempt to frame the young men.
Elgiz Shaydullin, a firefighter whose two sons were accused and have been detained for 18 months, denounced the decision of the Tartarstan regional Supreme Court, which sentenced his son Rustam, 19, to six years in prison.
``The evidence was all constructed to result in a guilty verdict,'' Shaydullin told The Associated Press. ``They knew exactly what was going to happen.''
His second son is among the 19 adults who have not gone to trial.
Two other teenagers were also sentenced to six years, he said, while the final pair received sentences of 5{ years after confessing to some of the charges, defense lawyer Marina Ganiyeva said.
All had previously insisted they were innocent.
The Federal Security Service the main successor agency to the KGB said it had uncovered an underground extremist group, Islamic Jamaat. In summing up the case last month, Judge Ilfir Sakhilov said the group's members had undergone training in Muslim militant camps, collected weapons and planned to blow up businesses and destabilize Tartarstan on the eve of the provincial capital's millennial celebration in August 2005.
Ganiyeva and Shaydullin said the convictions would be appealed.
Neither court officials nor prosecutors could be reached for comment Wednesday.
Activists said the trial was part of a pattern of security services' harassment of pious Muslims, in an atmosphere of repression fed by the more than decade-long Russian war against Islamic militants and separatists in Chechnya.
Muslims make up just over half of the population in Tartarstan.
``The Russian authorities have launched a campaign of persecution against Muslims, which will radicalize the Muslim population,'' said Yelena Ryabinina of the Civil Assistance rights group.
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