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CRIME

Truck driver sentenced to life in jail for murdering jogger

A German court on Friday sentenced a Romanian truck driver who confessed to the rape and murder of a jogger to life imprisonment, after he came under suspicion for the 2014 killing of another woman.

Published: 22 December 2017 14:23 CET
Truck driver sentenced to life in jail for murdering jogger
Catalin C. in court in Freiburg on Friday. Photo: DPA.

The regional court in the southwestern city of Freiburg found the defendant, identified only as 40-year-old Catalin C., guilty at the end of a high-profile trial that began in November.

Presiding judge Eva Kleine-Cosack found an “extreme severity of guilt” when handing down the verdict, meaning that Catalin C. will probably serve more than the 15-year minimum usually associated with a life sentence in Germany.

He had admitted in court to sexually assaulting and killing a 27-year-old German woman who had gone for an afternoon run.

He said at the start of his trial that he attacked the woman with a bottle and that he was “shocked” by his own actions.

“What I have done is unforgivable,” he said.

He denied having a sexual motive for the crime, as alleged by the prosecution.

Prosecutors claim that Catalin C. raped the young woman and then beat her with an iron rod until she died. It took days and a large search operation before her body was found in the woods outside Freiburg.

Catalin C. was arrested in June and investigators have since said that forensic evidence links him to the unsolved murder of a 20-year-old French exchange student in the Austrian town of Kufstein in 2014.

The woman, from the French city of Lyon, was also raped before she was killed.

German news agency DPA, citing the court, reported that Catalin C. admitted to the murder in Austria during a psychological examination.

A Freiburg court spokesman told DPA that Austria had already filed an extradition request to try him there.

But Catalin C. can still appeal the ruling in Germany, which would delay any transfer out of the country.

CRIME

Germany arrests Syrian man accused of plotting to kill soldiers

German authorities said Friday they had arrested a 27-year-old Syrian man who allegedly planned an Islamist attack on army soldiers using two machetes in Bavaria.

Published: 13 September 2024 11:17 CEST
Germany arrests Syrian man accused of plotting to kill soldiers

The suspect, an “alleged follower of a radical Islamic ideology”, was arrested on Thursday on charges of planning “a serious act of violence endangering the state”.

The man had acquired two heavy knives “around 40 centimetres (more than one foot) in length” in recent days, prosecutors in Munich said.

He planned to “attack Bundeswehr soldiers” in the city of Hof in northern Bavaria during their lunch break, aiming “to kill as many of them as possible”, prosecutors said.

“The accused wanted to attract attention and create a feeling of insecurity among the population,” they said.

German security services have been on high alert over the threat of Islamist attacks, in particular since the Gaza war erupted on October 7th with the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Police shot dead a man in Munich this month after he opened fire on officers in what was being treated as a suspected “terrorist attack” on the Israeli consulate in Munich.

The shootout fell on the anniversary of the kidnap and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games by Palestinian militants.

The 18-year-old suspect had previously been investigated by authorities in his home country Austria on suspicion of links to terrorism but the case had been dropped.

The incident capped a string of attacks in Germany, which have stirred a sense of insecurity in Germany and fed a bitter debate of immigration.

Three people were killed last month in a suspected Islamist stabbing at a festival in the western city of Solingen.

READ ALSO: ‘Ban asylum seekers’ – How Germany is reacting to Solingen attack

The suspect in the attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State group, was a Syrian man who had been slated for deportation from Germany.

A federal interior ministry spokesman said if an Islamist motive was confirmed in the latest foiled attack, it would be “further evidence of the high threat posed by Islamist terrorism in Germany, which was recently demonstrated by the serious crimes in Mannheim and the attack in Solingen, but also by acts that were fortunately prevented by the timely intervention of the security authorities”.

The Solingen stabbing followed a knife attack in the city of Mannheim in May, which left a policeman dead, and which had also been linked to Islamism by officials.

Germany has responded to the attacks by taking steps to tighten immigration controls and knife laws.

READ ALSO: Debt, migration and the far-right – the big challenges facing Germany this autumn

The government has announced new checks along all of its borders and promised to speed up deportations of migrants who have no right to stay in Germany.

The number of people considered Islamist extremists in Germany fell slightly from 27,480 in 2022 to 27,200 last year, according to a report from the federal domestic intelligence agency.

But Interior Minister Nancy Faeser warned in August that “the threat posed by Islamist terrorism remains high”.

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