A man is said to have locked his partner in her Munich apartment for years. Out of jealousy, says the prosecutor. However, the defendant tells a completely different story.
Munich – The phone was turned off, the windows taped shut, the door locked: a 63-year-old is said to have locked his partner in her apartment in the Bavarian capital for several years.
The trial against him for deprivation of liberty and multiple rape began today at the Munich District Court I.
According to the indictment, the man prevented his girlfriend from leaving the house without him for years. In the end, she was not allowed to leave the apartment at all. He is said to have installed surveillance cameras and motion detectors and logged off her landline phone so that she could no longer contact her friends.
While on vacation in Italy, he is said to have tied her foot to the bed with a chain so that she could not leave the room. Finally, the defendant himself is said to have spent the whole day in the apartment and monitored the woman. He ordered groceries from the delivery service.
The presumed motive for all of this: jealousy. “Fear of other, especially younger men,” says the prosecutor. In 2014, he is said to have taped the windows of the Munich apartment with paper and foil so that she could not look outside and see other, younger men there. He is said to have forced her to write in a notebook 500 times: “I don’t look at men.” He is said to have raped the woman again and again in order to punish her. There was initially no information about her age on Tuesday.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, the woman was freed from her situation by the police – “physically battered and powerless”. The property management had informed the officials because the woman had only replied by post, but had not been seen for a long time and the door did not open when someone rang the doorbell.
The man himself, who was extradited to Germany from his home in Greece and is now housed here in a psychiatric hospital, tells a completely different story that is difficult to understand.
He denies the allegations. “The indictment is worthless, I have contradicted all of the points,” he says. His partner had a key and was able to leave the apartment. The woman is lying. However, leaving the apartment was dangerous. Because the criminal police and the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) were targeting him. “I’m public enemy number one.”
He reports that criminal investigators would ambush him everywhere and try to kill him – with poison in cappuccino or in french fries with ketchup. According to the indictment, the woman he is said to have held was no longer allowed to enter her own kitchen for fear that she, too, intends to poison him.
The public prosecutor’s office, which accuses the man of deprivation of liberty and rape in 30 cases, assumes that he is paranoid and schizophrenic, but at least guilty with regard to the rape allegation. The court has scheduled a total of eleven trial days. The verdict could be announced on December 15th. dpa
