Matthias Hintze kidnapping case
The Matthias Hintze kidnapping case was a German kidnapping case that occurred in 1997 and in which the victim perished. Matthias Hintze, then 20 years old, was kidnapped on September 14, 1997 by Vyacheslav Orlov and his accomplice Sergei Serov in order to extort a ransom of DM 1 million . Matthias Hintze suffocated in a hole in the ground in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania .
Act and investigation
On September 14, 1997 at around 9 p.m. Serow and Orlow forced Matthias Hintze, then 20, into the trunk of his old Mercedes in front of his parents' house in Geltow . When his mother came home a little later, she found the house lit and the door open. As it turned out later, the perpetrators apparently only wanted to steal the diamond blue Mercedes 123 Coupé and were surprised by Hintze in flagranti.
In Glindow , the perpetrators were involved in a car accident and the trunk lid of the Mercedes popped open. Hintze called for help and tried in vain to free himself. The perpetrators forced him back into the trunk and drove away. The BMW involved in the accident also drove away. The police then searched unsuccessfully for the two cars involved in the accident. Two days later, on September 16, 1997, the burnt-out BMW was discovered near Potsdam . The police initiated a nationwide manhunt for a suspect Romanian. However, the trace later turned out to be wrong. On September 17, 1997, the Mercedes was discovered by Hintze in a Berlin forest. The police now extended the search for the Romanian to large parts of Europe . Finally, on September 18, 1997, Hintze's parents received a letter from the kidnappers demanding a ransom.
On September 26, 1997, 12 days after the kidnapping, the Brandenburg police published a photo in which Matthias Hintze could be seen trapped in an earth shaft. "His life is in extreme danger if we don't find him," said the investigators. For the first time, the police announced that day that there had been an attempted ransom delivery, but it had failed. One day later, another money handover failed. On October 2, 1997, the fourth attempt to hand over the ransom failed. According to the police, the parents named communication difficulties with the presumably Russian-speaking kidnappers as the reason.
The investigators suspected that Hintze could be held on a former military site of the Soviet army near Berlin. Hundreds of people then combed the abandoned areas. The 60-person “Matthias” special commission was formed. The police also used helicopters , dogs and infrared cameras . 1,200 reports were received from the population.
On October 7, 1997, two plainclothes officers noticed two men and a gold-colored BMW with Russian license plates at a remote telephone booth in Berlin-Spandau . The two men were unarmed and were arrested after a brief scuffle. They later turned out to be the culprits. A day later, Matthias Hintze was found dead in the hiding place after the perpetrators had revealed the hiding place. On the Müritz behind the village of Gotthun , the perpetrators had built a pit lined with beams and wooden panels in a piece of forest, which was one meter wide, two meters long and four meters deep. The autopsy showed that Matthias Hintze had suffocated, died of thirst or starvation 20 days before the discovery.
Condemnation
For the kidnapping and death of Matthias Hintze, the Potsdam Regional Court sentenced the two Russians Vyacheslav Orlov and Sergej Serow to fourteen and a half years in prison each in 1999.
Two years after their conviction for the kidnapping and death of Matthias Hintze, they were found guilty in Berlin of having abducted the Berlin computer dealer Alexander Galius. Galius is missing to this day. The investigators assume that the two murdered him.
Serov tried to escape
Sergei Serov broke out of custody in mid-November 1998. He abseiled from the roof of the Potsdam JVA, which was recorded by a surveillance camera from the neighboring Ministry of Transport. He is said to have been employed in the prison as a house handyman and thereby had additional freedom. The police then triggered an international manhunt. After three days on the run, he was arrested around 40 kilometers from the prison in Berlin.
The then Justice Minister of Brandenburg , Hans Otto Bräutigam , offered to resign to Prime Minister Manfred Stolpe after the outbreak . After Serov's arrest, Stolpe refused.
background
At the later court hearing, the background of the two perpetrators became known. Both come from remote parts of Russia. Serov was born in a village in Siberia north of the Urals . He grew up on the Chukchi Peninsula in the far north of Russia, at times in a tent with 15 to 20 other families. His parents worked in a mine . He himself trained as a mechanic . Orlov came from Krasnogorsk and was a driver . He served with the CIS troops stationed in Brandenburg . He stated that in 1992 he washed dishes in the Hintze restaurant as a temporary worker. The Hintzes parents owned an inn in Geltow . The Spiegel showed a lack of understanding about the fact that the hijackers themselves sought out this family, because it is "by no means wealthy people" acted.
At the end of August 1992, Sergej Serow and a fellow countryman raided a hi-fi shop in Berlin-Charlottenburg . The perpetrators used irritant gas and hit workers with a Wehrmacht pistol before they could escape with money from a stolen handbag. Because of the particular brutality of the attack, the Berlin Regional Court sentenced him in February 1993 to a prison term of six years and six months. “Even then it was evident that he had an inversely proportional relationship between intelligence and brutality. He had just attacked the shop in which he had recently worked as a temporary worker, ”wrote SPIEGEL in 1997.
As a car dealer, Vyacheslav Orlov had contact with the judiciary. He came to Germany in 1991 and worked in the field of car theft . The police arrested him in December 1993 and he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in nine cases by the Berlin regional court for commercial stealing . The district court gave him credit for showing remorse and regretting his actions.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Gisela Friedrichsen: CRIMINAL JUSTICE: Have a good cheer in the pit? In: Der Spiegel . tape April 14 , 1999 ( spiegel.de [accessed October 8, 2017]).
- ↑ a b c d e f Bayer, Co and: KRIMINALITÄT: Tod im Erdloch . In: Der Spiegel . tape 42 , October 13, 1997 ( spiegel.de [accessed October 8, 2017]).
- ↑ a b c Chronicle of the Hintze kidnapping case. Retrieved October 8, 2017 .
- ↑ a b Katrin Bischoff: Deportation to Russia: Hintze kidnappers released early . In: Berliner Zeitung . ( berliner-zeitung.de [accessed on October 8, 2017]).
- ↑ a b Hintze kidnapper Serow managed to escape . In: Der Tagesspiegel Online . November 15, 1998, ISSN 1865-2263 ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed October 8, 2017]).
- ↑ Wolfgang Bayer, Thilo Thielke: AUSBRECHER: Keys to freedom . In: Der Spiegel . tape 48 , November 23, 1998 ( spiegel.de [accessed October 8, 2017]).