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The farmer is accused of attempted murder, the Lower Austrian pleaded not guilty. Differences of a financial nature are considered a possible motive, and disputes are said to have occurred beforehand. The jury trial is scheduled for two days and will resume on Friday.
Old farmer “still not healthy”
The cause is located in the agricultural sector. On August 23 of the previous year, the then 81-year-old father of the accused fell in the living area of a farm in the St. Pölten area. The senior later alerted the rescue service himself, and he was initially treated for the fall in the St. Pölten University Hospital. The state of affairs seemed “strange” to the doctors, the prosecutor explained. A blood test eventually revealed poisoning. According to the prosecutor, the old farmer is “still not healthy” after a long hospital stay.
The drug brodifacoum was found in the victim’s blood. “A preparation with a directly toxic effect,” as forensic expert Wolfgang Denk emphasized. The amount administered in the case and the number of recordings would not be able to be determined exactly. “You can also administer very small doses over very long periods of time” in order “to get into an effective range,” added a toxicological expert. He characterized brodifacoum as an anticoagulant with a time-delayed effect. In principle, rat baits are provided with bitter substances. However, their perceptibility decreases rapidly in the event of a dilution.
Son had “opportunity and motive”
A rat poison that contained the substance was secured at the 53-year-old’s farm. The prosecutor emphasized that the accused was the only one who had “opportunity and motive” for administering this poison. The defendant denied both. He was not with him in the days before his father’s fall. He didn’t give any thought to the “meals on wheels” that the old farmer bought. He has rat poison at the farm to treat fields with it selectively.
When asked, the defendant did not rule out that the 82-year-old had taken the substance himself. According to Denk, however, there is no evidence of this.
Dispute over father’s farm
The background to the matter of motives is a handover contract for the farm of the accused’s father drawn up in 2002. The accused is now the owner, but has been staying at his wife’s farm since the late 1990s. If the worst comes to the worst, he has to pay for the care of the senior, but generally also for his food, among other things. “He has the hated father sitting there,” emphasized the prosecutor. In the event of the death of the old farmer, the accused could have sold the property or lived in it himself, it was said.
difficult relationship
The mutual relationship was described by father and son as quite difficult. Both stated that they had avoided each other for the most part in the past few years. According to the public prosecutor’s office, there is a documented history. The 53-year-old punched his father in the summer of 2021, and another attack followed in the summer of the previous year. The defendant himself denied this when questioned. The now 82-year-old old farmer also spoke of a threat from the accused in the context of the video-recorded contradictory victim survey.
The charges also include assault and coercion. If convicted, the suspect faces 10 to 20 years in prison or life. The hearing will continue on Friday with the questioning of other witnesses. The presentation of the psychiatric report by the expert Werner Brosch is also planned.
Source: Nachrichten
