After the March 2018 attack, statements and evidence must be
join together.
By Dirk Lotze
Haan/Wuppertal – In the case of the life-threatening acid attack on a Haan businessman and top manager, a multitude of pieces have to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle before the Wuppertal district court.
The 42-year-old defendant now states that at the time of the crime on March 4, 2018, he was lying in bed and asleep at his then address in Belgium. He had never been to Haan. Unknowns who wanted to harm him would have stolen his DNA from his clothes or hairbrushes. So they would have left a false genetic fingerprint of him at the crime scene. His portrayal: “I know too much. I know dark secrets.” However, he only wants to reveal them when he is transferred back to Belgium from Germany. The court is conducting circumstantial evidence to clarify what happened with traces and evidence.
According to the public prosecutor, the man ambushed the victim while he was jogging in the Musikantenviertel together with an as yet unknown accomplice: the financial expert Dr. Bernhard Günther, then a member of the board of the Innogy Group. The attackers attacked the victim on a footpath near Karl-August-Jung-Platz and brought him to the ground. The second man held Günther, the accused poured extremely corrosive sulfuric acid over the victim’s face and upper body. Then they fled.
Günther escaped to his house, washed off as much acid as possible with water and called the police. He survived badly injured; he will suffer the consequences in the long run and will be severely disfigured. As it became known at the trial, his children were sleeping in the house unsuspectingly: they were woken up by the police.
According to the public prosecutor, there are indications that the accused may have acted as a contract offender. Günther suspected a connection with his work at the time. A circumstance that his lawyer rated as previously completely unknown in German industry.
The police investigated in all directions. A coroner specifically investigated whether the injured party could have injured himself. She testified in court. Your photos show Günther’s shattering injuries from the day of the crime and later in the hospital. Severe burns covered the entire face. One eye had clouded over because the cornea was injured.
The doctor explained: The extensive wounds could have resulted in a life-threatening infection with blood poisoning. Irrespective of this, going blind would have been possible. And as a result: No, from a medical point of view it cannot be ruled out that the injured person burned himself. However, it is very unlikely: “Typically, those affected save the areas that are particularly sensitive to pain in such an event.” Like the face.
The defendant followed the lecture visibly seriously. He was arrested in late 2021 after an anonymous tip. At the beginning of the trial he only talked about his CV, but later added that he first heard about the allegations while he was in custody. He was shocked. He doesn’t know the victim. The man elaborated on a work glove found at the crime scene said to carry his genetic traces. He said: “I’ve never worn black gloves.” Likewise, a scarred injury on his left foot has no connection to the sulfuric acid used in the crime.
According to the defendant’s theory, strangers could have gotten his DNA when they broke into his car four weeks before the acid attack: “They stole brushes, gloves and cigarette butts.” That was in the parking lot of a prostitution company on the Lower Rhine, a so-called sauna club ; he visited four days a week. As a guest, he assumed a position of trust with the managing director, and others were jealous of that. The 42-year-old said he later took part in a kind of gang dispute for supremacy in the company. He sees his enemies in the group of opponents at the time. His assumption: “Innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time should be punished.”
The court plans to continue hearings on August 8, 2022
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