Murders of Nicholas Alden and Zachary Cuddeback

On 2 March 2011, a gunman opened fire on a United States Air Force bus parked outside a terminal at Frankfurt Airport in Germany. The bus was preparing to carry 15 American airmen to Ramstein Air Base. According to German investigators, the attacker approached a waiting airman, asked him for a cigarette, and asked whether the group was bound for Afghanistan; when the airman confirmed this, the attacker waited for him to turn away and then shot him in the back of the head. He then boarded the bus, killed the driver, and fired at two other airmen, wounding them. When he aimed the pistol at a fourth serviceman and pulled the trigger, the weapon jammed.

Two servicemen were killed: Senior Airman Nicholas Alden, 25, of South Carolina, and Airman First Class Zachary Cuddeback, 21, of Virginia. Two others were seriously wounded. Staff Sergeant Kristoffer Schneider was shot in the right temple and lost the sight in one eye; the right side of his face was rebuilt with titanium, part of his skull was later removed after an infection, and he was medically retired in 2012. Edgar Veguilla was struck in the jaw and arm and suffered nerve damage.

The attacker fled but was pursued by a civilian airport employee and by Staff Sergeant Trevor Brewer, the serviceman at whom the jammed pistol had been aimed, and was overpowered by two German police officers before being arrested. The two pursuers were later awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany at a ceremony on 16 January 2012, presented by Federal Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, who cited their courage in helping the Federal Police detain the suspect.

The man arrested was Arid Uka, a 21-year-old Kosovo-born ethnic Albanian who had lived in Germany since infancy and worked at the airport post office. According to the account presented at trial, he had shown no prior extremist leanings but radicalized rapidly from the late summer of 2010 after immersing himself in Salafi-jihadist material online. His defence lawyer said the attack was prompted by a video Uka believed showed U.S. soldiers sexually assaulting Iraqi women; the clip was in fact taken from the American film Redacted. German authorities said Uka confessed after the shooting.

On 10 February 2012, the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt (Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt am Main) convicted Uka of two counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment with a finding of "exceptional gravity of guilt," a determination that bars the usual parole eligibility after fifteen years. The presiding judge described the case as the first Islamist-motivated terrorist attack in Germany. Because his sentence exceeds three years and he does not hold German citizenship, Uka is to be deported to Kosovo after serving his term.