The woman was handcuffed naked to a concrete slab and sunk in the river. What exactly happened in the hours before her death is likely only known to the three defendants. But they are silent.
Verden / Aller – In the murder trial for the death of a 19-year-old sunk in the Weser, the verdicts are expected on Thursday (10 a.m.). Since February, two men and a woman have had to answer before the Lower Saxony district court in Verden – the indictment is accusing the German of murder.
But the process could not clarify how the seriously mentally ill young woman died. According to the prosecutor, it is unclear whether she was thrown alive or dead over a bridge railing into the river in April 2020.
A bargee found the body less than three weeks after the crime. The woman was naked, tied to a concrete slab, and sunk in the river. Since the body lay in the water for a long time and certain standards were not met during the autopsy, the cause of death could not be clearly determined.
From the point of view of the public prosecutor’s office, it is certain that the defendants acted cruelly and inhumanely. Accordingly, the 19-year-old, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, urgently needed medical help. But the 41-year-old “bought” the young woman and tried to market her as a prostitute – together with his best friend at the time and his former partner.
When the 19-year-old’s health deteriorated rapidly, she was taken to a garage. What happened there is unclear because the defendants were silent. What is certain is that the 19-year-old was finally tied to the concrete slab with a cable and thrown into the river at the Weserschleuse in Balge in the Lower Saxony district of Nienburg.
According to the prosecutor, it is obvious that the 19-year-old was sunk alive. It is therefore also possible that she was killed in the garage, or that she was left alone there in a helpless state and died. It is also conceivable that the young woman was unconscious and the defendants thought she was dead when they threw her into the Weser.
In their plea, the public prosecutor’s office called for life imprisonment for the three defendants for attempted murder by omission and for human trafficking. The co-lawsuit followed suit. The defense, however, considers significantly lower penalties to be appropriate.
The 41-year-old’s lawyer applied for a prison sentence of less than five years for trafficking in human beings and dangerous bodily harm by failure. The 54-year-old’s lawyer demanded that his client be convicted of aiding and abetting human trafficking and dangerous bodily harm through omission. The 40-year-old’s lawyer applied for a two-year suspended sentence for dangerous bodily harm through failure and failure to provide assistance. dpa
