Key ISIS recruiter in Germany sentenced to 10 years in prison

Abu Walaa was known as the 'faceless preacher' for his online sermons delivered with his back to camera

Abu Walaa appears in court to hear the verdict after a four-year trial in Celle, Germany. Getty

The Iraqi leader of an ISIS network in Germany was sentenced to jail for 10 and a half years for his role in recruiting youngsters at his mosque to send to Syria.

Abu Walaa, an imam known as the "faceless preacher" because he appeared in online videos with his back to the camera, had a following of thousands on Facebook and recruited vulnerable people to the ISIS cause.

Abu Walaa, named in court as Ahmad Abdulaziz Abdullah A, recruited at least seven people who travelled to the Middle East where they fought alongside ISIS militants.

They included two who died during separate suicide bomb attacks on Iraqi Army positions in 2015 that killed more than 150 soldiers.

He preached at a mosque in the northern city of Hildesheim, outside Hanover, and was arrested in 2016 during a series of co-ordinated police raids.

He was held with four other suspects in what Heiko Maas, Germany's justice minister at the time, described as an "important blow to the extremist scene in Germany". The mosque was later closed down.

Abu Walaa is believed to have spoken at a Berlin mosque frequented by Anis Amri, a Tunisian who drove a lorry through a crowded Christmas market in the city in 2016, killing 12 people and injuring more than 50.

German intelligence officials saw Amri visiting Hildesheim 10 months before the attack, prompting speculation that he was part of Abu Walaa's network.

Walaa, 37, was found guilty of being a member of a foreign terrorist organisation, financing terrorism and aiding the preparation of subversive events, said the Higher Regional Court of Celle in northern Germany.

Three other men were given jail sentences of between four and eight years. Another man pleaded guilty and was sentenced to jail for three and a half years in April last year.