Neo-Nazis were classified as "terrorists" by a German court for the first time in two decades on Monday as 12 young members of an extreme-right group were jailed for attacking shops and fast food outlets.

The group's members were aged between 14 and 18 at the time of the 10 attacks on the immigrant-owned businesses between August 2003 and May 2004 in the small town of Havelland outside Berlin.

The Brandenburg regional superior court sentenced the group's ringleader to four and a half years in jail and ordered the other members to be detained for between eight months and two years.

No one was injured in the attacks which caused around 800,000 euros (1.06 million dollars) of damage.

They were members of a so-called "Kameradschaft" or comradeship, named "Freikorps". Researchers fear that neo-Nazi groups are gaining a stronghold in many parts of the former communist east of Germany through such youth-oriented groups.

At the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s a number of neo-Nazi groups were adjudged to be "terrorist" organisations in Germany, but an attempt to punish the publisher of an extreme right-wing newspaper under anti-terrorist legislation failed in the late 1990s.