Patrick Schöbel about the prisoner exchange: “Age, they really let me go home!”

When Patrick Schöbel takes his bull terrier Django to his close familiar Judith, he says: only for a few days. Schöbel wants to fly to Russia to meet a woman he met on the Internet in December 2023. A Russian. Then everything turns very differently. For more than half a year, Schöbel, 38, a house technician from Hamburg, sits in a Russian prison while the process is taken. He threatens up to seven years in prison due to drug smuggling. Last Thursday, Schöbel, with 25 other prisoners, surprisingly came as part of the prisoner exchange between Russia and several western countries.

When Schöbel is released from the Bundeswehr hospital in Koblenz on Saturday afternoon, he went to Judith to Hanover, here Schöbel grew up. She supported him over the months, and he sent her letters from prison, closest writing on checkered paper, always signed: Your Patrick from the hell of St. Petersburg. The star Both meet for a conversation at the kitchen table in their apartment.

On January 15, Patrick Schöbel flies from Hamburg to Istanbul and via Antalya to Saint Petersburg. The plane ends up around two in the morning.

Mr. Schöbel, what happened at the airport in Saint Petersburg at the time?
I quickly put on a fresh T-shirt on the toilet and brushed my teeth. I was looking forward to the meeting, she had already written that she was waiting outside. I took my bag off the assembly line and went through the green exit at customs. I had nothing to register. So when a customs officer waved me out for control, I was completely relaxed. My luggage was X -rayed, then the very friendly civil servant asked me to unpack my backpack. I was the first to reach into the lid compartment and took everything out of it: visa, passport – and a sachet with six gummy bears. And I thought: Oh shit.