German author Akif Pirinci was sentenced to nine months in prison, without the possibility of parole, for inciting hatred by a court in Bonn on Monday.

The 64-year-old was convicted because of his hostile comments about immigrants on a blog. Mustafa Kaplan’s lawyer told the German Agency that he has already filed an appeal against the sentence, which is therefore not yet final.

It is not the first time that the author, born in Istanbul in 1959, is convicted of incitement to hatred.

He insists that his often very provocative and abusive statements are protected by the right to freedom of expression.

Akif Pirinci emigrated in Germany in 1969 with his family. He grew up in the Eifel region, near the former capital of Germany, Bonn.

Since 1989 he has become famous thanks to a series of detective novels in which cats play a central role. The novels sold millions of copies, were translated into several languages ​​and brought to the big screen.

But in the last ten years, the author has attracted attention more for his far-right, populist and Islamophobic positions.

In 2014, his first non-fiction book, Germany Gone Mad: The Wicked Cult of Women, Gays and Immigrants, was published.

A year later, addressing demonstrators belonging to the xenophobic organization PEGIDA in Dresden, he uttered the phrase “unfortunately, concentration camps no longer operate”.