FRANKFURT, Germany • A Kosovo-born man was sentenced Friday by a German court to life in prison for the killing last year of two U.S. airmen, one from O'Fallon, Ill., at Frankfurt airport, in a case described as the first successful Islamist-motivated attack in Germany.

Arid Uka also was convicted on three counts of attempted murder. Uka was charged with two counts of murder for the March 2 slaying of Airman 1st Class Zachary R. Cuddeback, 21, of O'Fallon. Senior Airman Nicholas J. Alden, 25, of South Carolina, also was killed.

Cuddeback was born at Scott Air Force Base and raised in O'Fallon, Ill. His family moved to Virginia, where Cuddeback grew up. However, at his family's request, Cuddeback was buried at Scott. He was interred next to his grandfather. His grandmother Lois "Tiny" Loyet still lives in O'Fallon.

The indictment says Uka went to the airport armed with a pistol, extra ammunition and two knives. Inside Terminal 2, he spotted two U.S. servicemen who had just arrived and followed them to their U.S. Air Force bus.

After 16 servicemen, including the driver, were on or near the bus, Uka approached one of the men for a cigarette, prosecutors said. He confirmed they were U.S. Air Force members en route to Afghanistan, then "turned around, put the magazine that had been concealed in his backpack into his pistol, and cocked the weapon," the indictment said.

He first shot unarmed Alden in the back of the head, the indictment alleged. He then boarded the vehicle shouting "Allahu Akbar" — Arabic for "God is great" — and shot and killed Cuddeback, who was the driver, before firing at others.

Uka was only prevented from killing more when his pistol jammed and he was overpowered by soldiers and German police.

Although prosecutors said he had been radicalized by jihadist propaganda on the Internet, investigators said they had found no evidence linking Uka to a terrorist group.

As the exceptional severity of his crime was also proved, he is unlikely to be eligible for parole in 15 years, as would be usual under German law.

He earlier told police he shot the uniformed Americans to take revenge for U.S. military operations against Muslims. The soldiers were unarmed at the time. They were on their way to the nearby U.S. Army base Ramstein and from there were due to leave for Afghanistan.

The defense said that Uka was irrational at the time of the killings as a result of watching a film the evening before that depicted U.S. soldiers raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl. Uka had believed the depiction was real.

At the beginning of the trial in August, Uka had shown remorse for his crimes, telling the court: "It's true what the prosecution says. ... I wanted to kill the soldiers. ... Today I don't understand myself any more how it could have got so far."

"I had to do something and believed that there was no alternative," he said.

Prosecutors told the court he had wanted to make his own contribution to jihad and had made himself a "master of life and death."

Though he grew up in Germany, Uka now faces deportation to Kosovo because he does not have German citizenship.