Prague, May 9 (CTK) – The appeals Prague High Court toughened the prison sentence given to Czech man Jan Silovsky, who wanted to join Islamic State (IS) in Syria, from three years and three months to six years yesterday.
The verdict has taken affect.
The court accepted the state attorney’s appeal, demanding a higher sentence.
The Plzen Regional Court sentenced Silovsky, the first Czech prosecuted for intention to join IS, to three years and three months in prison in February. Both Silovsky and the state attorney appealed the verdict.
Silovsky was detained at the international airport in Istanbul in February 2016 with a one-way air ticket for an inter-state flight to the town of Gaziantep near the Syrian border. He ordered a car via the Internet to take him to the Syrian town of Jarabulus where he was to join IS.
He confessed this to the Turkish police and they sent him to the Czech Republic.
Silovsky confessed to his activities to the Czech police as well. He said first he expected to go to war, fight for the IS ideology and kill people.
However, later he questioned that he would like to join the IS fighting in Syria. He told the court that he did not go Syria to kill, but to let himself be killed.
According to the indictment of December 2016, Silovsky faced 12 to 20 years in prison, or possibly life imprisonment for the preparation of a terrorist attack.
The appeals court panel chairman, Zdenek Sovak, said today the regional court did not take the shift in Silovsky’s testimony into consideration and it overestimated his confession. Besides, the court did not take the dangerous and harmful character of his act into consideration, Sovak added.
This is why he agreed with the appeal filed by state attorney Marcela Kratochvilova.
Silovsky’s defence counsel Vojtech Dragun proposed today that the case be returned to the Plzen court for reappraisal. He wanted experts to examine whether Silovsky suffered from autism.
However, the appeals court considered this redundant. Experts previously concluded that there were no symptoms indicating Silovsky’s autism, the court argued.
