April 6 (Bloomberg) -- A Tunisian man had planned to become ``active in a violent Jihad'' while living in Germany, a Berlin court said today. He was sentenced to 3 3/4 years in prison for the possession of weapons and other offences.

Ihsan Garnaoui, 33, was found guilty of violating laws on the possession of weapons, forgery, tax evasion and entering Germany illegally, said Judge Frank-Michael Libera. After an 11- month trial, the regional court acquitted him of the main charge of founding a terrorist organization to plan bomb attacks.

``He entered Germany with the intention of becoming active in a violent Jihad and carrying out at least one attack with explosives,'' Judge Libera said. ``This is not enough to find the accused guilty of founding a terror organization.''

Federal Prosecutor Silke Ritzert accused Garnaoui of forming and training a terrorist group in Berlin after returning to Germany illegally in January 2003. The group was suspected in particular of planning a bomb attack during a demonstration against the Iraq war to ``kill or injure a large number of people,'' according to the Federal Prosecutor's Office.

The group's aim was to ``humble western society and hallow the Muslim world and its moral concepts,'' Ritzert told the court in her closing arguments. She had sought a six-year prison sentence for Garnaoui.

Acquittal Reasons

The court said it acquitted Garnaoui of the charge of founding the terror organization to carry out bomb attacks on Jewish and U.S. targets in Germany because it couldn't prove that Garnaoui convinced other people to join him. The court also had ``doubts about the reliability'' of evidence submitted by unidentified police informants, Libera said. He said some of this evidence was contradictory and based on hearsay.

``It isn't a true acquittal,'' said Arnd Boedeker, the court's spokesman.

Garnaoui, who has been in custody since March 2003, was arrested before the group could put its plans into action, Prosecutor Ritzert said. Even if the concrete targets couldn't be identified, the step was inevitable as the attacks couldn't have been prevented otherwise, she said. Prosecutors charged the suspect in May 2004.

Garnaoui has also been linked to the al-Qaeda terror network, which the U.S. says carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Ritzert accused him of having undergone training in an al-Qaeda camp in July 2001.

`Anti-American Attitude'

Garnaoui first settled in Germany in 1996. He married a German woman and had a child with her. The wife divorced him four years later as his beliefs had changed during their marriage from western European traditions to Islamic fundamental ones and he had developed an anti-American attitude, Ritzert has said.

Germany became the focus of investigations into terrorist operations after the discovery that three hijackers who took part in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had lived and studied in the northern city of Hamburg.

The Moroccan national Mounir El-Motassadeq, a member of the Hamburg group, is being retried after Germany's Federal Court of Justice in March 2004 overturned a 15-year sentence because the Hamburg Higher Regional Court didn't consider the testimony of Ramzi Binalshibh, the suspected chief organizer of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Abdelghani Mzoudi, the second man to stand trial for the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., was acquitted by the Hamburg Higher Regional Court in February 2004 because prosecutors failed to prove he helped plan the acts. The Federal Prosecutor's Office appealed the decision.

The case number is (1) 2 StE 1/04-5 (1-04).

To contact the reporter on this story: Claudia Rach in Berlin at crach1@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 6, 2005 09:41 EDT