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CRIME

Desperate wife laced husband’s coffee with rat poison

A 67-year-old woman from Styria tried to murder her dementia-suffering husband by lacing his coffee with rat poison - saying she did it because she felt overwhelmed and depressed with the burden of caring for him.

Published: 19 May 2016 12:03 CEST
Desperate wife laced husband's coffee with rat poison
Photo: Coffeecupgals/Wikimedia

The 77-year-old man was taken to hospital four times in the past two months – complaining of pain and bleeding, with symptoms similar to an overdose of blood-thinning drugs. A doctor took a blood test and realised he had been poisoned.

Police searched the couple’s house and found a packet of half-empty rat poison in the kitchen pantry.

The man’s wife wasn’t a suspect at first, as she had brought her husband to hospital each time, but when police questioned her she confessed to poisoning him. She said she had stirred it into his coffee as she felt she couldn’t cope any more and was desperate.

The couple have been married for 47 years. The woman will be held in police custody before her trial and will be examined by a psychiatrist.

TERRORISM

Austrian investigators seize devices at Munich shooter’s home

Investigators seized electronic devices at the home of a young Austrian who fired shots near Israel's Munich consulate, but found no weapons or Islamic State group propaganda material, authorities said Friday.

Published: 7 September 2024 09:02 CEST
Austrian investigators seize devices at Munich shooter's home

German police shot dead the 18-year-old man on Thursday when he fired a vintage rifle at them near the diplomatic building.

They said they were treating it as a “terrorist attack”, apparently timed to coincide with the anniversary of the killings of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games.

Authorities raided the gunman’s home in the Salzburg region, seizing electronic data carriers, Austria’s top security chief Franz Ruf told a press conference in Vienna on Friday.

READ ALSO: Munich Israeli consulate gunman was ‘Austrian national known to authorities’

During the raid, “no weapons or IS propaganda” material were found, Ruf added.

Despite being subject to a ban on owning and carrying weapons, the man managed to purchase a vintage carbine rifle fitted with a bayonet with around “fifty rounds of ammunition” for 400 euros ($445) the day before the attack, Ruf said.

He opened fire at around 9:00 am (0700 GMT) near the Israeli consulate, sparking a mobilisation of about 500 police in downtown Munich.

At a separate press conference in Munich, prosecutor Gabriele Tilmann said investigators were combing through the gunman’s electronic data but had yet to find conclusive evidence of his motive.

But the “working hypothesis” was that “the perpetrator acted out of Islamist or anti-Semitic motivation”, she told reporters.

Austrian police said on Thursday that the gunman, who had Bosnian roots, had previously been investigated on suspicion of links to terrorism.

Investigators last year found three videos he had recorded in 2021, showing scenes from a computer game “with Islamist content”, prosecutors said in a statement.

In one of them the suspect had used an avatar with a flag of the “al-Nusra Front”, a jihadist group active in Syria, said Ruf.

But the investigation was dropped in 2023 as there were no indications that he was active in “radical” circles, prosecutors said.

“The mere playing of a computer game or the re-enactment of violent Islamist scenes was not sufficient to prove intent to commit the offence,” they added.

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