BERLIN (AP) — An 80-year-old former officer with communist East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, was sentenced Monday to 10 years in jail for the homicide of a Polish man at a border crossing in divided Berlin 50 years in the past.
The Berlin state court docket mentioned in its ruling that there was little question that the then-first lieutenant shot the 38-year-old Polish citizen Czesław Kukuczka in an ambush on March 29, 1974 on behalf of the East German secret police, German information company dpa reported.
“It was not the act of a person for private causes, however deliberate and mercilessly executed by the Stasi,” presiding decide Bernd Miczajka mentioned in his sentencing remarks. He mentioned the defendant, whose title was not given in step with German privateness guidelines, fired the shot “on the finish of a series of command,” dpa reported.
The court docket fell in need of the Berlin public prosecutor’s request for 12 years in jail. The accused’s protection lawyer had demanded an acquittal. Based on lawyer Andrea Liebscher, it had not been confirmed that her consumer fired the deadly shot, dpa reported.
The defendant remained silent in court docket however his lawyer mentioned firstly of the trial that he denied the allegations. The decision can nonetheless be appealed.
The case goes again to March 29, 1974, when Kukuczka allegedly took a pretend bomb to the Polish Embassy to threaten officers to permit him to go away for West Berlin, and the Stasi determined to faux it was authorizing his departure.
He was supplied with exit paperwork and accompanied to a border crossing on the Friedrichstrasse railway station in East Berlin, in line with prosecutors.
The defendant — who was 31 on the time — was tasked with rendering the Polish man “innocent,” prosecutors mentioned. After the Pole had handed the ultimate checkpoint, the suspect allegedly shot him within the again from a hiding place.
Authorities made little headway with the case till a decisive tip-off in regards to the identification of the shooter emerged in 2016 from the Stasi’s voluminous archives, dpa reported. Prosecutors initially suspected the case would quantity to manslaughter, which not like homicide falls beneath the statute of limitations in Germany.
East Germany constructed the Berlin Wall in 1961, stopping most of its residents from touring to the West. Many tried to flee by tunneling beneath it, swimming previous it, climbing or flying over it. A minimum of 140 folks died within the try.
The closely fortified border was opened on Nov. 9, 1989, a key second within the collapse of communism in Europe. Germany was reunited lower than a 12 months later.