Berlin. An 80-year-old former agent of East Germany’s communist secret police, the Stasi, was sentenced Monday to 10 years in prison for the murder of a Polish man at a border crossing in Berlin 50 years ago.
The Berlin state court said in its ruling that there was no doubt that the then first lieutenant shot Czesław Kukuczka, 38, in an ambush on March 29, 1974, German news agency dpa reported.
“It was not the act of an individual for personal reasons, but ruthlessly planned and executed by the Stasi,” Judge Bernd Miczajka argued in his sentencing comments. He added that the defendant, whose name was not released in accordance with German privacy rules, shot “at the end of a chain of command,” Dpa reported.
The prosecution requested a sentence of 12 years in prison. The defense of the accused demanded his acquittal. According to lawyer Andrea Liebscher, it was not proven that her client fired the fatal shot, according to the agency. The verdict can be appealed.
The case dates back to March 29, 1974, when Kukuczka allegedly brought a fake bomb to the Polish embassy to threaten officials into allowing him to leave for West Berlin, and the Stasi pretended to be authorizing his departure.
They provided him with exit documents and escorted him to a border crossing at the Friedrichstrasse train station in East Berlin, according to prosecutors.
The defendant, who was 31 at the time, was tasked with releasing him “unharmed,” prosecutors said. After the Pole passed the last checkpoint, the suspect allegedly shot him in the back from a hiding place.
Authorities made little progress in the case until a decisive clue to the shooter’s identity emerged in 2016 from voluminous Stasi files, Dpa reported.
East Germany built the Berlin Wall in 1961, preventing most of its citizens from leaving for the west. Many tried to escape by tunneling under it, swimming past it, climbing or flying over it. At least 140 people died in the attempt.
The fortified border opened on November 9, 1989, a key moment in the collapse of communism in Europe. Germany was reunified less than a year later.
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