Image: APA/HELMUT FOHRINGER
Wrongfully so, as it now became clear, because public prosecutor Kerstin Wagner-Haase accepted the jury’s decision. She gave a waiver of appeal in the courtroom, meaning the acquittal is legally binding. The jury’s decision was not unanimous. Five rejected the charges, but three were convinced by the prosecutor that the 48-year-old was involved in the incriminated murder plot. The man’s relatives, who had been waiting anxiously for the verdict to be announced, reacted to the outcome of the trial with applause and tears of relief.
The Vienna Higher Regional Court (OLG) approved the reopening of the proceedings based on new evidence, released the man in May 2022 after 18 months in custody and ordered a new trial. The subject of the proceedings was an assassination attempt on a man who was knocked down with an elongated, tubular tool and critically injured in the early morning of November 20, 2018 in Hippgasse in Ottakring. He suffered, among other things, a traumatic brain injury and a skull fracture. The 48-year-old was subsequently suspected of having transferred a fee of 10,000 euros to the immediate perpetrator – who is serving a life sentence for attempted murder.
“I was convinced in the first legal process that it was him. I am convinced now too,” prosecutor Wagner-Haase emphasized in her closing speech. The credibility of the witnesses who exonerated the defendant was “a little thin.” It is “a very special procedure”. The victim of the murder attack survived “thanks to the best medical care and a bit like a miracle. But his life is irretrievably destroyed. He is constantly dependent on outside help.” One owes it to the victim to “take a very close look here. It’s about the rule of law. It’s about the obligation that contract killings must not go unsolved,” stated the public prosecutor.
“Prosecutor, it’s over,” defense attorney Michael Dohr countered. Dohr said the accusations against his client had collapsed like a house of cards: “There is no doubt for the defense that there is an innocent person here.” The lawyer told the prosecutor that he was “afraid of a constitutional state like the one you are calling for.” The criminal proceedings against his client ruined him economically and his marriage also broke up. “If he is convicted, I will give up my job,” Dohr announced in his closing statement, while the defendant concluded: “I have nothing to do with the matter. I am innocent.”
New evidence led to a reopening
New evidence led to the initial verdict being overturned and the trial being reopened, which suggested that the 48-year-old had probably been deliberately falsely incriminated by the mastermind of the murder plot. Two witnesses who had contact in prison with the mastermind, who was sentenced to life in prison for inciting attempted murder, claim that he confessed to them that he had dragged the 48-year-old into the matter out of revenge.
As the investigation into the attack in November 2018 revealed, the former father-in-law of the dejected and critically injured man ordered the attack – out of hurt honor because he had entered into an extramarital affair with his sister-in-law and had also fathered a child with her. This didn’t suit the Turkish-born real estate entrepreneur who had arranged his daughter’s marriage at all, so he wanted to have his ex-son-in-law removed.
For this purpose he looked for a killer, who he found after a long search for a corresponding fee. After the assassination attempt failed, those responsible were identified and arrested after a lengthy investigation. The victim’s ex-father-in-law was convicted by the Vienna Regional Court in October 2019 of incitement to murder, and the immediate perpetrator was convicted of attempted murder last February.
The 48-year-old was also co-accused and convicted last year, although the incriminating information provided by the mastermind was the sole deciding factor. He claimed that the 48-year-old knew the plan, accepted the hired killer’s demand for money of 10,000 euros, promised that a corresponding invoice would be issued and paid it. The 48-year-old vehemently denied this in his first trial, but the majority of the jury did not believe his protestations of innocence at the time. The man was found guilty of being an accessory to the crime and was sentenced to eleven years in prison.
“Implicated” in murder case
However, it then emerged that the mastermind of the murder plot had falsely accused the 48-year-old. A fellow prisoner of the 58-year-old former real estate entrepreneur wrote a handwritten letter to lawyer Marcus Januschke, one of the 48-year-old’s two defense attorneys, on September 1, 2022. In it, the sender stated that the mastermind had told him in the Josefstadt prison and later during a bus ride to the Stein prison that he had given false testimony against the 48-year-old and had “dragged” him into the murder case in order to get revenge. Motive: The 48-year-old is said to have sold land owned by the 58-year-old in Turkey and defrauded him in the process. “He is obsessed with the idea of revenge. With his lies he has persuaded the High Court to convict an innocent person,” the prisoner wrote in the letter. The writer also named another prisoner who had also heard that the 58-year-old was unfairly incriminating someone.
Last November, at the start of the second trial against the 48-year-old, these two men confirmed their previous statements to the new jury under the obligation to tell the truth. The 58-year-old wanted to take revenge because he assumed that the 48-year-old had taken away his property and assets, the older of the two initially described. The younger one then became very precise. In prison he asked the 58-year-old whether the rumors circulating in the prison were true that he had wrongly incriminated the 48-year-old. The 58-year-old confirmed this, the witness said: “He said it was out of revenge because he sold a property and made the money for Meier.” He then asked the 58-year-old to take back the false statement. The 58-year-old refused: “He’s so stubborn, he didn’t want to turn.” That’s why he sent a letter to the 48-year-old’s lawyer: “I didn’t want someone innocent to be put in prison.”
The Vienna Higher Regional Court, which examined the application for reopening in detail, found that the ex-father-in-law of the man who was almost killed had never linked the 48-year-old to this crime until August 2021. With the two new witnesses – the 58-year-old’s former fellow prisoners – it can “not be ruled out” that the evidence against the 48-year-old could be shaken, as it is stated in the decision with which the public prosecutor’s complaint against the case filed by a three-year-old The reopening approved by the judges’ senate was rejected: “The statements of the two witnesses that the only witness for the prosecution had admitted false incrimination to them (…) because he felt cheated cannot be denied as having significant evidentiary relevance, so these will be taken into account together the other evidence must be evaluated by a new jury.”
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Source: Nachrichten
