A German terror trial opened on Wednesday in Düsseldorf against Nezet S., a 22-year-old from the town of Mülheim on the Ruhr River. The defendant was arrested in September 2014, soon after his return from Syria, where he had stayed for roughly three weeks.

He has been charged with membership in "Islamic State" as well as planning a serious terrorist attack in Germany, and, if convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison. The prosecution argued that Nezet S. trained in Syria, fought with militants there and then returned as an IS inductee, before he was picked up by German security services.

Defense lawyer Eberhard Haberkern painted in rather subtler shades on the case's opening day at Düsseldorf's Higher Regional Court, however, saying that his client "fell into the clutches" of IS, only to see the error of his ways on arrival in Syria.

"He turned his back, once he saw what things were really like there," Haberkern said, adding that his client intended to testify in full later in the trial.

Training, or bathing?

Haberkern described frequent alarms at nights and one instance in which IS fighters towed a heavily damaged tank, still covered in blood, back to camp. At this stage, the lawyer said that his client insisted on returning to Turkey, where he had crossed the border into Syria in the first place. After 16 days of waiting, the attorney said, his client was able to return to Turkey and then Germany.

Acknowledging that his client "fell into the clutches" of the wrong people, Haberkern insisted that the defendant had neither joined IS, nor fought with the terrorist group in Syria. He said his client did not spend those 16 days fighting, but rather bathing and waiting to leave.

Judge Barbara Havliza told the court that the defendant's mobile phone was found to contain "films that do not make particularly pleasant viewing." Havliza's court has set aside nine trial days for the case.

From college to the "caliphate"

Neither side seems to dispute that the German-born 22-year-old with Albanian parents had become attracted to radical Islam. He became close to a group of Salafists in the western Ruhr region via a project called "Read!" (in German: "Lies!"), which claims on its website to have distributed more than a million copies of the Koran, free of charge, since 2011.

Nezet S.'s classmates at his technical college first noticed a change in his behavior when they frequently saw him surfing Salafist propaganda websites in class, urging others to read Salafist texts, and appearing barefoot with a prayer mat at sports classes.

Local newspaper "Der Westen" reported before the trial that Nezet S. had clashed with his parents over their more moderate interpretation of Islam, praying irregularly and occasionally drinking alcohol. They, in turn, were said to be highly concerned about their son's new interests.

The questions in Nezet S.'s trial are likely to revolve around his short time in Syria and any contacts he made on returning to Germany last year. Neither side has disputed the image of a young man, struggling at school, becoming radicalized and traveling to Syria's civil war. The jury will be asked to decide whether Nezet S. was scared back to his senses by what he encountered or whether only his prompt arrest after returning stopped him from using training the prosecution says he received to plan an attack in his country of birth.

Editor's note: Deutsche Welle follows the German press code, which stresses the importance of protecting the privacy of suspected criminals or victims and obliges us to refrain from revealing full names in such cases.