On March 2, 2011, 21-year-old Arid Uka walked up to one U.S. airmen outside the airport in Frankfurt Germany and shot him in the head. Witnesses said he boarded a U.S. Air Force bus, shot a second airman to death and injured two more.
Uka has already confessed to the shootings, and prosecutors are seeking a life sentence. His lawyer's defense as Uka's trial was wrapping up earlier this week?
They were going to pin some of the blame on video games, according to the U.S. military's newspaper Stars and Stripes:
Defense lawyers will highlight Uka's youth and immaturity and what they say was the effect on Uka of Internet propaganda coupled with violent computer games he played.
"With the games, how easy it is to kill somebody," Uka's lawyer, Jens Joerg Hoffmann, said. "You just push the reset button."
Uka, a native of Kosovo, had been angered by what he thought was an online video depicting American soldiers raping an Iraqi girl. It turned out to just be a clip from a Hollywood movie.
It's not clear how hard Uka's lawyers really tried to use this video game defense during closing arguments on Monday, as follow-up reports focused on defense lawyer Michaela Roth explaining his client's own childhood trauma and naivete:
"He's not a man. He's a boy who spent his time playing computer games," said defense attorney Michaela Roth.
Roth said that the shootings were not religiously motivated but had happened because Uka wanted to protect helpless Afghan victims from being raped by American soldiers. Roth said Uka, who had been sexually molested with he was 6 years old by a man, had been in part driven to the shootings after watching a clip of the movie "Redacted" showing the rape by U.S. soldiers of an Iraqi girl and the murders of her and her family.
Uka will be sentenced by the German court on January 19.
Prosecutor: Uka turned bus into ‘deadly tunnel' [Stars and Stripes]
(Top: Mario Vedder | AP)