Contract murder
A contract murder is the murder of a person, carried out by one or more contract killers who have been commissioned by one or more persons or organizations or a state to do so. Contract murder can take place against payment or other types of payment. Borrowed from the English language , the term killer is often used for a contract killer.
Legal situation in Germany
Contract murder is not a legal term in Germany. From a legal perspective, the client is often the instigator and the executor is the main culprit ; However, cases are also conceivable in which the person behind the crime makes himself liable to prosecution as the perpetrator (keyword: perpetrator behind the perpetrator). Killing against payment usually meets the criteria of greed in the crime of murder. Murder is a criminal offense in Germany according to § 25 , § 26 and § 211 StGB .
The contractual agreements of the executor and his client are void according to § 134 BGB . Claims cannot be derived from this, in particular no performance can be requested.
criminology
Contract killings occur both in organized crime , increasingly in mafia- like structures, and in the secret service sector.
Examples from the area of organized crime are the murders of Werner Pinzner in the red-light district of Hamburg-St. Pauli or numerous murders commissioned by the Cosa Nostra or other criminal organizations in the United States .
In Italian the murderer and especially the assassin as are Assassino designated, the choice of words comes from the time of the Crusades and refers to the time in Southwest Asia -based sect of the Assassins , the numerous bombings and assassinations has executed.
Contract killings in the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany
Contract murder through organized crime was and is in Germany - in contrast to organized crime in Russia, Italy and the United States - an extremely rare crime. Even back in the days of the Berlin “ ring clubs ” of the Weimar Republic , contract killings were the absolute exception, which was mostly disapproved in the milieu. It looked different in the political field. Femocides by right-wing extremists claimed many victims in the opposing camp , especially in the first half of the 1920s .
The hit man Werner Pinzner achieved sad notoriety in the Federal Republic of Germany , which brought him to the front page of Der Spiegel . Pinzner, who committed various contract killings in the power struggles of the Hamburg neighborhood in the early 1980s and was finally convicted, killed his wife Jutta and the public prosecutor Wolfgang Bistry on July 29, 1986 during his interrogation in the old Hamburg police headquarters and thereupon committed suicide . Contract killings within the Vietnamese cigarette mafia in Berlin and Leipzig during the 1990s also received wide media coverage .
Political contract killings in the Federal Republic of Germany mostly received a lot of media attention . These include the statements made by the KGB killer Bogdan Staschinski, who later defected, about the murders of the exiled Ukrainian politicians Lew Rebet and Stepan Bandera with specially made hydrocyanic acid pistols in Munich in 1957 and 1959, or the spectacular murder of opponents of the regime by the Iranian secret service in Mykonos. Assassination .
Contract killings in the secret service sector
An example of a murder in the secret service sector is the murder of the Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko with the radioactive element polonium 210 . Litvinenko was given the fatal dose on November 1, 2006, hidden in a small Japanese rice nibble that was served to him and friends in a London sushi restaurant. Shortly afterwards he was admitted to a clinic, where he died shortly afterwards, despite the intensive efforts of the doctors.
Another case that has become known is the murder of the Bulgarian dissident Georgij Markov in London in 1978 using ricin . The substance, contained in a 1.5 mm bullet, was shot in his right calf by his murderer with the help of a converted umbrella . Markov died four days later with fever and hypotension in heart failure .
Contract murder in popular culture
There are a number of clichés for fictional contract killers that are now firmly rooted in popular culture. Contract killers are often portrayed as silent loners who appear out of nowhere to kill a target and then disappear again without a trace. Protagonists in the role of contract killer can be treated differently; In the conflict between commission and conscience, for example, the author or director opens up a wide field of character development. Examples are Nikita and Léon - Der Profi . The other common main cliché is the hit man as a soulless murder machine, as a psychopath who, as a relentless adversary, drives the plot to its conflict-laden climax (as in the feature film Collateral ).
The Japanese anime series Noir also deals with the subject of contract murder from the perspective of two professional killers. The genre also finds its place in the video game industry. In the Hitman game series , the player controls the hit man 47 .
literature
- Klester Cavalcanti: The Pistoleiro. The real story of a contract killer . Transit Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-88747-284-9 .
