A court has sentenced a police officer to 5 months in prison, commuted to three years’ probation plus a donation to a victims’ organization, for failing to launch investigations against a man accused of attacking his girlfriend with a knife in August 2024.
Five months later, the same individual went on to kill a young child and an adult, wounding three other people, while .
The 29-year-old officer was convicted on charges of obstruction of justice, with prosecutors arguing that his failure led to there being no criminal investigation of the Afghan national, .
Judge says officer displayed carelessness and laziness
Judge Torsten Kemmerer at Alzenau district court in Bavaria sentenced the officer to 5 months in prison, but ordered the defendant with no prior convictions to serve three years’ probation and donate €3,000 (roughly $3,500) to a victims’ organization instead of submitting to jail time.
The verdict can be appealed.
Alzenau is a smaller town in the Aschaffenburg district, near the state border to Hessen.
Kemmerer acknoweldged that the case was a complicated one involving a minor crime, with differing versions of events, but said it was still a law enforcement officer’s duty to investigate a crime.
“He simply did nothing, nothing at all,” Kemmerer said in court on Tuesday, accusing the officer of “carelessness” and “laziness.”
Prosecutor Christoph Gillot had called for a jail term of 18 months, arguing that the defendant “knew” that the case invovled “a dangerous assault with a knife.”
“We knew it from the evidence samples, from video, and from witness statements,” Gillot said.
Defense lawyers had meanwhile appealed for acquittal, arguing it was not adequately proven that the policeman knew either of the Ukrainian woman’s injuries or the alleged use of a knife.
The defendant declined to comment in court on the question of why he did not file a criminal investigation.
The trial heard evidence of poor communication between four officers involved in the case, but the prosecutors’ office ultimately dropped the charges against the other three as they were not the lead investigators.
Aschaffenburg attacker currently on trial
Prosecutor Gillot said it was not clear whether an earlier criminal investigation would have prevented the fatal knife attack in the same area five months later in January, but also argued that this was not relevant to the case.
The case, and news of the defendant being known to law enforcement, .
Lawyers for the 28-year-old do not dispute their client’s involvement in the January attack in Aschaffenburg’s Schöntal Park. But they do argue that he is not of sound enough mind to face conviction and should be confined in a psychiatric facility indefinitely.
One expert witness has testified in that trial saying the man is a paranoid schizophrenic. He had a past conviction for a separate assault and had been temporarily submitted to psychiatric care facilities three times.
The Afghan national’s motives or reasoning for attacking a nursery group on the streets are still not clear.
A verdict in that case is currently anticipated this Thursday, October 30.
Edited by: Louis Oelofse
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