Ahmed H., earlier sentenced for his participation in illegal migrants’ crashing with police at the Röszke border station in 2015, will be put on probation and expelled from the country, according to a court ruling.
Court spokesman Lászlo Soros told MTI that the Syrian national, sentenced for “illegal border crossing committed as member of a rioting crowd as well as complicity in a terrorist act” last year, has served two-thirds of his five-year term with regard to the time he spent in pre-trial detention.
H. was sentenced to 10 years in prison in the first instance, in 2016. According to the indictment, the defendant had “threatened to pull down a cordon and attack police; he spoke to the crowd through a loudspeaker several times, and threw objects in the direction of the officers in three instances and illegally crossed into Hungarian territory”. In its justification to the sentence, the court said that H. had committed terrorist activities through illegally crossing the border in a violent crowd and through violence against the police.
An appeals court in southern Hungary, however, threw out the sentence in 2017, and ordered a repeat procedure, as a result of which H.’s term was halved in September last year.