Image: INGRID KORNBERGER (APA)
A 34-year-old was sentenced to seven years in prison on Monday in the Leoben regional court for the manslaughter of his ex-wife. In January, he stabbed her in the basement of her house in Mürzzuschlag with a steak knife. The man admitted the stab wounds, but his defense attorney Bernhard Lehofer spoke of a “generally understandable violent emotion”. The jury ruled that it wasn’t murder but manslaughter. The judgment is not final.
Ex-couple still lived together
The 34-year-old woman was found in January with numerous stab wounds and cuts in the head and neck area in the basement of the block of flats where she had lived with her ex-husband. At the beginning of the trial, prosecutor Anika Maierhofer spoke of an act that was characterized by “incomprehensible brutality”. The two had married in 2015 but divorced in 2020 as the 34-year-old received more financial support for herself and her teenage daughter from the state. The then 33-year-old lived “on paper” with his parents-in-law. In fact, he always lived with his ex-wife and a new marriage was also planned.
New love
But that changed when the 34-year-old started working in an asylum center and met a four-strong Afghan refugee family there. When she was to be deported, she gave them shelter in the shared apartment in Mürzzuschlag from November 2022. After a few weeks, however, his ex-wife fell in love with the Afghan woman, the prosecutor said. The two women were a couple from the beginning of January.
“He couldn’t accept the end of the relationship,” the prosecutor continued. That’s why he lured his ex-wife into the basement on January 24 to confront her. However, according to the indictment, he is said to have taken a steak knife with a twelve-centimetre-long blade and rolls of paper into the basement. When she told him again that it was over between them, “great anger came over him”. He “started to stab with full force,” said Maierhofer. The woman bled to death before her 13-year-old daughter found her mother in the basement.
Defense Attorney: Killing wasn’t planned
Defense attorney Lehofer said that it was not about whether he committed the crime, “that is out of the question”. The lawyer was convinced that his client had stabbed in a “generally understandable violent emotion”. He was an “atypical perpetrator”: “He hadn’t come up with a plan.” The knife was already in the basement.
Judge Robert Schwarzl asked the accused why he allowed a family of four to move into the shared apartment: “I had concerns about whether it would work out, but I gave in out of love,” he said. He did everything for his ex-wife, she was his “great love”. When the Afghan woman also slept in the bedroom with the 34-year-old because she was afraid of the dog they shared and he had to lie on the living room couch with the Afghan woman’s husband, the judge asked: “Why don’t you say that they have to go, or that they go themselves?” – “I was obviously wearing rose-colored glasses,” replied the native of Vienna.
“Thought she was coming back to me”
Around the New Year, his wife broke up with him and said she had fallen in love with the Afghan, he said. “I’m going now at the latest, right?” the judge asked him. “I was sad and disappointed but figured it was only temporary and she would come back to me.”
His ex-wife’s lover was subsequently heard as the first witness. She stated that on the day of the crime he behaved differently than usual: “He went down and up a few times.” But she couldn’t say whether he was there in the basement. He also took two rolls of toilet paper and she noticed that he was in the kitchen. But she wasn’t sure whether he had taken a knife with him from there.
The jury found it was not murder. They recognized manslaughter. The 34-year-old was sentenced to seven years in prison. He immediately accepted the verdict. The prosecutor made no statement. The judgment is therefore not final.
Source: Nachrichten
