Cologne- Court of Dusseldorf in Germany Monday sentenced to life in prison an Islamist militant who plotted a failed bomb attack at a railway station, and it handed jail terms to three other extremists.

Marco Gaebel, 29, a German citizen, planted a homemade pipe bomb in a sports bag at the main train station of Bonn, the capital of the former West Germany, in December 2012.

Gaebel and the three others were also found guilty of forming a terrorist organization and of plotting to shoot dead the leader of anti-immigrant group Pro-NRW in North Rhine-Westphalia state, which is a far-right party, in March 2013.

The four militants were furious after the right-wing fringe group had staged an anti-Islamic street protest.

Two of the other defendants, Turkish-German Koray Durmaz, 28, and Albanian Enea Buzo, 46, received prison terms of 12 years while German Tayfun Sevim, 27, was given a nine-and-a-half-year jail term.

Judge Frank Schreiber handed down the sentences in a high-security courtroom in the western city of Duesseldorf after a two-and-a-half-year trial, which included testimony from 27 experts and 157 witnesses.

Prosecutors argued that shortly after the failed bomb attempt, Marco G. founded a domestic terror organization that was inspired by an audio recording of an Islamist movement in Uzbekistan.

The assassination attempt was in motion in March, 2013 in Leverkusen, but was foiled by police who had been monitoring the defendants for some time.

Defense lawyers for the four men argued that there was insufficient evidence to convict them and had pursued an acquittal.