Seven years and three months imprisonment for Rüsselsheim shooters

RÜSSELSHEIM / DARMSTADT – Seven years and three months in prison yesterday, the district court of Darmstadt ruled against a 25-year-old from Rüsselsheim. He had been responsible for a trial there since the end of January after shooting members of a hostile family in Bahnhofstrasse in April 2019 (we reported). The public prosecutor originally charged him with attempted murder. After a complicated taking of evidence, the 11th Grand Criminal Chamber saw only the attempt at manslaughter as clearly proven.

After all, he had not insidiously ambushed his victims, the shots were rather the culmination of a longer smoldering dispute, the presiding judge Volker Wagner justified this assessment. According to the investigation, the dispute had its immediate cause in a gold chain. It is said to have been torn down by a Rüsselsheim rapper who appeared in the café of one of the attacked people. The accused’s younger brother had already had a violent clash on the occasion and had already been sentenced to prison.

Investigators have repeatedly heard that the background of the fact is said to have also supplied arms and drugs. The 25-year-old and several of his family members had been regularly employed by the police and judiciary for years. However, the accusation of the arms trade could never be proven. The arsenal of firearms that were used in the shootout a year ago in the pedestrian zone and later in Waldstraße was all the more impressive. Among other things, so-called partial shell bullets from military stocks were found, with which particularly large wounds can be torn.

The fact that the families had in the meantime tried to settle the conflict against payment of money before an Islamic peace judge was irrelevant to the Darmstadt Chamber when it came to ruling. Such a “shadow justice” rather represents a danger in itself. This was also expressed in the unwillingness of numerous witnesses to testify before the district court and to help clarify the case – among them even a judicial officer from Rhineland-Palatinate, who dealt with the victim was friends. In the end, however, the court apparently was able to convince itself of the guilt of the accused.

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