Police murder in Heilbronn

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Memorial plaque for the victims of the neo-Nazi group of perpetrators at the crime scene in Heilbronn.
From 2007 to 2012, at the place of today's plaque, this simpler plaque commemorated the killed policewoman Michèle Kiesewetter.

In the murder of a police officer in Heilbronn , the police officer Michèle Kiesewetter was killed with a targeted head shot on April 25, 2007 on the Theresienwiese in Heilbronn , her colleague Martin A. was also critically injured by a targeted head shot. The murder case first became known to the public after years of searching for the Heilbronn Phantom . Since November 2011, the crime has been attributed to the right-wing terrorist group National Socialist Underground (NSU). The murder took place one year after the last case of the Ceska series of murders , in which the NSU murdered nine small businesses with a migration background in major German cities from 2000 to 2006 .

Sequence of events

On April 25, 2007, the two riot police parked their patrol car on Heilbronn's Theresienwiese to take a break. At around 2 p.m., witnesses heard several shots. Police officers then found the 22-year-old Michèle Kiesewetter dead and her 24-year-old colleague Martin A. seriously injured next to the car. The crime scene analysis led to the assumption that two perpetrators approached the vehicle from behind and shot the officers in the head. Since Martin A. saw a perpetrator in the rearview mirror, he turned to the perpetrator and was shot sideways in the head. The shells and projectile parts allowed conclusions to be drawn about two weapons , a Tokarew TT-33 and a Radom VIS 35 . The officers' service weapons of the type HK P2000 and handcuffs were stolen. The surviving policeman, who was in a coma for several weeks , still has part of the projectile in his head. Based on his memories, a phantom drawing of a perpetrator was made. A person who stared at Michèle Kiesewetter and another colleague the previous evening, according to the interrogation of this colleague, resembled the phantom image that was created from Martin A.'s memories.

Investigations until 2011

The investigation was initially carried out in the Heilbronn Police Department by the special commission on parking . This was partially taken over by the State Criminal Police Office of Baden-Württemberg on February 11, 2009 in order to relieve the Heilbronn police . The Federal Prosecutor's Office has been investigating the connection with right-wing terrorist acts since November 11, 2011 .

Search for the Heilbronn Phantom

The samples taken by the forensics department on the police vehicle contained the DNA of an unknown woman; For a long time this was considered to be the most promising investigation approach. After this DNA could be detected at more than forty crime scenes over the years, five special commissions, six public prosecutors in three German federal states and police investigators in Germany , Austria and France were busy investigating the matter. The alleged perpetrator, who was called the Heilbronn Phantom , was assigned a number of different crimes in different places in Austria, France and Germany both before and after the police murder, which made the investigative authorities increasingly doubt the usefulness of these traces. At the end of March 2009 it was finally announced that the DNA found came from a contamination of the cotton swabs used for securing evidence ; the DNA comes from a packaging employee of a company involved in manufacturing. As a result, this investigation had to be dropped.

Unsuccessful investigation

The LKA, responsible from 2009, reported in the same year after questioning witnesses and investigations that up to six people could have been involved in the crime. The people were seen by the witnesses a few minutes after the crime. In addition, the LKA had 14 phantom images made, 3 of which were intended for publication. A judicial application for publication was rejected by the Heilbronn public prosecutor's office responsible at the time, on the grounds that the content of the individual witness statements did not meet the legal requirements for publication. As a result of the NSU preliminary investigation , the competence of the Federal Public Prosecutor was shifted, who also did not classify the corresponding testimony as credible. There was no match between the phantom images and the possible perpetrators of the National Socialist underground .

For a long time there was a search among Sinti and Roma for the perpetrators who had been in the area on the day of the crime. In May 2012, the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, Jörg Ziercke, regretted the public false suspicions against the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, which he said was due to the media. A polygraph test was carried out on a suspect during the investigation. The psychologists maintained that the man was “a typical representative of his ethnic group ”, which means that “the lie was an essential part of his socialization”. The Central Council of German Sinti and Roma then accused the investigators of having investigated based on racist prejudice and filed a complaint against the Baden-Württemberg police in February 2014.

The Baden-Württemberg State Office for the Protection of the Constitution is said to have received information about right-wing violent criminals from an informant with the code name "Krokus" . Accordingly, right-wing extremists tried to find out the health of the seriously injured police officer.

After the NSU was uncovered: the service weapons were found and further information

The stalled investigation started again on November 4, 2011 in Eisenach when the stolen service weapons of the murdered policewoman and her injured colleague were found . The weapons were found next to the bodies of the alleged perpetrators of a bank robbery in their motorhome; there were two the Thuringian Homeland Security attributed to right-wing extremists , Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt . After the service weapons were found by the LKA Thuringia, the SoKo parking lot was included in the securing of evidence in the camper van that was removed the same evening.

On November 8, 2011, another suspect was arrested, Beate Zschäpe , who is said to have set fire to the apartment in Zwickau in which she lived with the two alleged bank robbers shortly after the bank robbery on the same day . In this apartment, the two possible weapons were found, a Tokarew TT-33 and a Radom. Excerpts from a video on a DVD also found in the destroyed apartment connect the group with this murder.

Without mentioning the source, Der Spiegel reported in August 2012 that the Federal Criminal Police Office had detected traces of blood on sweatpants seized from the NSU's apartment in Zwickau, which could be clearly assigned to Kiesewetter through a DNA comparison. In September 2012, the first NSU investigative committee of the Bundestag set up to investigate the neo-Nazi murders announced that no motive for the murder of Kiesewetter had yet been determined. In addition to the faulty DNA trace of the Heilbronn phantom, an unknown DNA trace was found on Martin A.'s back that did not come from the suspect.

backgrounds

Although the murder weapons were found during investigations into the right-wing extremist National Socialist underground , the motive for the crime, unlike the murders of nine small business owners, which were allegedly committed by the same perpetrators between 2000 and 2006, remains open. In December 2011, the Federal Criminal Police Office announced that, after evaluating a secured hard drive, the investigators now assumed that the motive was to obtain weapons and that they had ruled out an act of relationship.

According to a report by Focus magazine , Beate Zschäpe was at the train station shortly before the time of the crime, according to an ambiguous surveillance video, accompanied by an almost bald man. According to witness statements, Zschäpe - or a woman with a headscarf accompanied by two men - could then have been at the scene around the time of the crime.

Kiesewetter was born on October 10, 1984 in Oberweißbach / Thuringian Forest in Thuringia, went to primary school there and was a member of the fair. She grew up with her mother and a stepfather whose name she took on. In 2002 she went to the police, from 2003 to the state riot police in Baden-Württemberg. She was an active athlete (cross-country running, biathlon). Kiesewetter was buried in her hometown on May 2, 2007, attended by 1,300 mourners.

When the President of the Federal Criminal Police Office, Jörg Ziercke , voiced suspicion in front of a Bundestag committee in 2011 that Kiesewetter and Uwe Böhnhardt might have been known or friends, the mayor of Oberweißbach Jens Unangel contradicted in an open letter.

In September 2012 it became known that a Thuringian policewoman who had covered up or supported the activities of neo-Nazis knew Kiesewetter. In addition, she was friends with Kiesewetter's godfather, also a police officer. Eight days after the murder of his godchild, he in turn stated that, in his opinion, the act was related to the nationwide "murders of the Turks". How the statement of the godfather is to be weighted, from what knowledge he already suspected the connection at this early point in time and whether the direct and indirect acquaintances of Kiesewetter in the right-wing extremist scene are related to the crime remains unclear. In March 2014, the policewoman testified before the Thuringian NSU investigative committee that she had been threatened. Among other things, two men came to her home and “advised” her not to remember “certain things” in connection with the Heilbronn police murder.

Another possible reference of the murder case to the terrorist group was made public in April 2017 by an ARD documentary. It showed film recordings of the laying of the wreath on April 27, 2007, two days after the crime, which apparently shows a graffito on the wall of the transformer house in Heilbronn Theresienwiese, which is located directly at the scene of the crime, apparently with the letters "NSU". This had previously escaped the investigation authorities; The responsible federal prosecutor's office announced in May 2017 that it did not see any criminal connection with the NSU. Members of the NSU investigative committees of the Bundestag and the Baden-Württemberg state parliament saw the previous failure as an indication of a possible further investigation mishap and demanded that photos of other NSU crime scenes and further photos of the Theresienwiese crime scene be evaluated again.

Several witnesses, some of whom only reported to the police years after the crime, declared independently of one another that they had seen several blood-smeared people in the vicinity of Theresienwiese immediately after the shooting of Kiesewetter, some of whom fled. Various experts based their assumption on this that the NSU consists of more than three people. The second NSU committee of the Bundestag therefore expressed serious doubts about the sole perpetrators of Mundlos and Böhnhardt.

Criminal proceedings and committees of inquiry

The police murder was also dealt with in the trial against Zschäpe and four NSU supporters before the Munich Higher Regional Court , for the first time in January 2014. Several police officers investigating at the time and Kiesewetter's colleague Martin A. were summoned. His memories of the day of the act are patchy after the injury he suffered. The Federal Prosecutor's Office assumes that Kiesewetter had "no contacts in the right-wing scene" and that both police officers were random victims who represented the state hated by the NSU. Until 2002, two riot police in Kiesewetter's unit were members of the Ku Klux Klan section European White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (EWK KKK), which existed in Schwäbisch Hall in the early 2000s . The EWK KKK had also the underwriter Thomas Richter (code name "Corelli") belonged, who had moved in the environment of the NSU core trio since 1995 and is among other things on an address list that early 1998 in the NSU terrorists as Bomb workshop used garage in Jena was found . The co-plaintiffs doubted the thoroughness of the investigation by the Federal Criminal Police Office. Kiesewetter's superior was also one of the founders of Uniter and was questioned by the NSU investigation committee of the Thuringian state parliament.

On December 9th, 2015, Beate Zschäpe said when she read aloud statement in the NSU trial that Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt had told her that they had committed the murder of Kiesewetter in order to get at the service pistols of the police chief and her colleague, as their own Weapons jammed. Clear doubts have been expressed about her statement. Zschäpe added to her statement when asked by the chairman judge Manfred Götzl in January 2016 that she “believed that you lied to me about the actual motive”.

In July 2018, Zschäpe was sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the Heilbronn murder and the particular gravity of her guilt was determined. The four accused supporters were not found to be linked to the Heilbronn murder.

The state parliament of Baden-Württemberg began to come to terms with the Heilbronn murder with the establishment of a right-wing extremism inquiry commission on April 30, 2014, which was interrupted after a few meetings and suspended for the time of the investigative committee; the commission's work was not resumed thereafter.

On November 5, 2014, the state parliament of Baden-Wuerttemberg set up the investigative committee “The processing of the contacts and activities of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) in Baden-Wuerttemberg and the circumstances of the murder of the police officer MK”. The committee was supposed to "clarify the way in which the judicial and security authorities in Baden-Württemberg cooperated with federal and other state authorities in investigating the murder of policewoman MK in Heilbronn, the attempted murder of her colleague and the series of murders by the NSU." Various invited experts, including the former chairmen Clemens Binninger and Eva Högl of the first Bundestag NSU investigation committee and the journalists Stefan Aust and Dirk Laabs , expressed doubts in front of the committee about the thesis of the federal prosecutor's office that the police officers were accidental victims. According to an LKA officer who was questioned in the Baden-Württemberg NSU investigative committee, stating that Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos were the perpetrators meant that traces that pointed in a different direction became meaningless, as described using the example of the phantom images .

The committee of inquiry dealt extensively with the following topics in a total of 20 questions:

The final report with almost 1000 pages was presented and discussed on February 18, 2016 in the Stuttgart state parliament. The chairman of the committee, Wolfgang Drexler , emphasized from the resolution recommendations of the report - including the establishment of a continuing committee of inquiry in the following legislative period - that "blocking of knowledge and too early commitment to individual investigative approaches" must be prevented. The state parliament unanimously accepted the decision recommendations of the committee of inquiry.

The second NSU investigative committee of the state parliament, which was set up on July 20, 2016, is also investigating further indications of so far unevaluated traces. Most recently, a witness claimed in June 2018 that an Islamist was on Theresienwiese on the day of the crime.

Commemoration

In April 2007 around 2000 police officers remembered the police officer Michèle Kiesewetter, who was shot at the age of 22, in a funeral procession in Böblingen. She was buried on May 2, 2007 in the presence of around 1300 mourners and with the participation of the public in her home town of Oberweißbach in Thuringia . The then police chief of Baden-Württemberg Erwin Hetger described in his funeral speech the "unscrupulous act" as a "new quality of violence that we could not imagine".

In Heilbronn, a plaque at the scene of the crime commemorates the murdered policewoman and the other murder victims from the same group of perpetrators. The police officer himself preferred the unusual spelling of her first name with the acute - accented characters , Michéle , generally its name is today with the Gravis - accented characters written, Michèle , including on her grave stone in Oberweißbach and at the 2012 renewed memorial plaque in Heilbronn. The name of the policewoman can also be found on a stele in memory of the murder victims on the street of human rights in Nuremberg.

The murder of Michèle Kiesewetter is the subject of an ARD documentary that was broadcast for the first time on the 10th anniversary of his death.

See also

literature

  • Klaus Pflieger : Against Terror. A prosecutor's memories. Verrai, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-9818041-4-0 , chapter: The murder of Police Master Kiesewetter and the "National Socialist Underground (NSU)" , pp. 372–386.
  • Frank Brunner: The Theresienwiese crime scene. In: Andreas Förster (Ed.): Secret thing NSU. Ten murders, no trace of any investigation. Klöpfer and Meyer, Tübingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-86351-086-2 , pp. 15-38.
  • Hajo Funke : NSU state affair. An open investigation. Kontur, Münster 2015, ISBN 978-3-944998-06-0 , chapter “The assassination attempt on the policewoman Michèle Kiesewetter and the policeman Martin Arnold on the Theresienwiese in Heilbronn”, pp. 35-77.
  • Barbara John (ed.) In collaboration with Vera Gaserow and Taha Kahya: Our wounds cannot be healed. What the NSU terror means for the victims and their families. Herder, Freiburg, Basel, Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-451-06727-3 , chapter “Not a day goes by that we don't miss it. The Kiesewetter family tells ”, pp. 145–152.
  • Tanjev Schultz : NSU. The terror from the right and the failure of the state. Droemer, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-426-27628-0 , chapter "Policemen and Racists: The Murder in Heilbronn", pp. 307–352.
  • Thumilan Selvakumaran: Unwanted memories. Who were the perpetrators and what was their motive for the police murder in Heilbronn on April 25, 2007? The official thesis ignores the results of the investigation , in: Andreas Förster / Thomas Moser / Thumilan Selvakumaran (ed.): End of the Enlightenment. The open wound NSU , Tübingen (Klöpfer & Meyer) 2018, pp. 19–43. ISBN 978-3-86351-479-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christiane Kohl: Police murder from Heilbronn - final act of a real crime novel. In: sueddeutsche.de . November 9, 2011, accessed April 16, 2015 .
  2. ↑ a b Südwest Presse online services: Phantom images published Police murder: connections to Hall? In: swp.de. July 18, 2013, accessed April 24, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Protection of the Constitution deny presence in police murder , Spiegel Online November 30, 2011
  4. ↑ From the court by Annette Ramelsberger: NSU trial - The witness with the bullet in the head. In: sueddeutsche.de . February 4, 2014, accessed April 24, 2015 .
  5. ↑ a b Südwest Presse online services: The covered up phantom images from Heilbronn. In: swp.de. February 1, 2014, accessed April 24, 2015 .
  6. ^ A b Thomas Moser: Police murder from Heilbronn: "Umpolung". In: heise.de . August 9, 2015, accessed February 26, 2016 .
  7. ↑ Carsten Friese: Heilbronn police murder: LKA takes over phantom case . In: Heilbronn voice . February 12, 2009 ( from Stimme.de [accessed on February 12, 2009]).
  8. ^ Press release from the Federal Prosecutor's Office of November 11, 2011
  9. ↑ Spiegel Online: Cotton swabs should not have been used for DNA analysis from March 27, 2009.
  10. ↑ "Phantom Murderer" is a Phantom - Spiegel online article from March 27, 2009.
  11. ↑ NSU police murder in Heilbronn report Munich with new facts and questions , Bayerischer Rundfunk on July 10, 2012 ( Memento from July 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ↑ Pflieger, Klaus, 1947-: Against the terror: memories of a public prosecutor . Verrai, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-9818041-4-0 , pp. 380 - The police murder in Heilbronn .
  13. ↑ Sinti and Roma instead of NSU under suspicion. The regret of the Federal Criminal Police Office , in: TAZ, article from May 11, 2012 , accessed on September 16, 2012
  14. ↑ Racism in investigations? , m.stuttgarter-zeitung.de on February 4, 2014.
  15. ↑ Central Council of Sinti and Roma reports the police , in: zeit.de of February 4, 2014
  16. ↑ The Ministry of the Interior handed over files to swr.de on May 27, 2013
  17. ↑ Police murder suspects were right-wing extremists. ( Memento from November 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Zeit Online , November 9, 2011.
  18. ↑ Service weapon found by a shot officer. Spiegel Online from November 7, 2011.
  19. ↑ Bank robbers owned the weapon of the policewoman who was shot in Heilbronn. Online edition of the Thüringer Allgemeine , November 8, 2011, accessed on August 21, 2015.
  20. ↑ a b Traces of terror on the sweatpants , in: Der Spiegel , article from August 13, 2012 , accessed on September 16, 2012.
  21. ↑ Spiegel TV Magazin: The Brown Cell , November 13, 2011.
  22. ^ NSU committee: The background to the police murder remains unclear. In: Die Welt , September 13, 2012.
  23. ↑ Matthias Reiche: NSU investigations - Unknown DNA raises questions. In: Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk , June 27, 2016. Web archive ( Memento from June 27, 2016 on WebCite )
  24. ↑ Heilbronn police murder. Investigators suspect gun procurement as a motive. In: Der Spiegel , December 23, 2011.
  25. ↑ Kiesewetter murder case - the woman in the surveillance video resembles Beate Zschäpe. In: Focus Online , August 8, 2012.
  26. ↑ Was Zschäpe in Heilbronn on the day of the murder? In: Heilbronner Voice , 6 August 2012.
  27. ↑ Jochen Neumayer: How and why did policewoman Michèle Kiesewetter die? In: Hamburger Abendblatt , January 15, 2014.
  28. ↑ Per Hinrichs: The anatomy of the murder of Michèle Kiesewetter. In: Investigativ.de , Rechercheblog der Welt , April 29, 2012.
  29. ↑ Thuringian police officer covered neo-Nazis. In: Der Tagesspiegel , September 7, 2012.
  30. ^ The NSU police murder in Heilbronn: New facts, new questions. In: Bayerischer Rundfunk , Dossier Report Munich, July 10, 2012.
  31. ↑ Witness reports of threats in NSU investigations. In: Zeit Online , March 10, 2014.
  32. ↑ NSU crime scene in Heilbronn: Federal Prosecutor's Office investigates NSU lettering. In: SWR Aktuell , April 24, 2017; Hans-Jürgen Deglow: NSU expert Binninger: Check all photos from the crime scene again. In: Heilbronner Voice , April 25, 2017; Hans-Jürgen Deglow, Carsten Friese: Police murder: NSU lettering continues to cause discussions. In: Heilbronner Voice , May 24, 2017; BT-Drs. 18/12950 , pp. 1059-1061 (PDF).
  33. ↑ https://www.zdf.de/politik/frontal-21/polizei-uebersah-nsu-schriftzug-amtatort-heilbronn-100.html
  34. ^ Tanjev Schultz: NSU. Munich 2018, pp. 311–317.
  35. ↑ Kiesewetter colleagues were in the Ku Klux Klan. In: Welt Online , January 21, 2014.
  36. ↑ mdr.de: Co-founder of Uniter: NSU committee summons Kiesewetter's superiors -. In: mdr.de. March 14, 2019, accessed March 20, 2019 .
  37. ^ NSU trial: Documentation. The statement of Beate Zschäpe. In: Welt Online . December 9, 2015.
  38. ↑ Zschäpe's unbelievable statement on the Heilbronn police murder case. In: Heilbronn voice . December 9, 2015.
  39. ↑ Konrad Litschko: NSU trial in Munich: "One Ali less". In: The daily newspaper . January 21, 2016.
  40. ↑ State Parliament Baden-Württemberg - Investigation Committee "Right-wing Terrorism / NSU BW". ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) In: Landtag-BW.de , November 5, 2014.
  41. ↑ Michael Schwarz: Murder of a policewoman Random act? In: Mannheimer Morgen , February 17, 2015.
  42. ↑ Press release - Inquiry committee "Right-wing Terrorism / NSU BW" presents a joint final report. In: Landtag-BW.de , January 15, 2016.
  43. ↑ NSU-U committee ends work - why Heilbronn of all places? In: Stuttgarter Zeitung (online edition), February 18, 2016.
  44. ↑ Sven Ullenbruch: A new track for the NSU inquiry. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung , June 4, 2018; Johanna Henkel-Waidhofer: "I know everything, but I can't say". In: Context: weekly newspaper , July 25, 2018.
  45. ↑ Possible weapon found. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 9, 2011.
  46. ↑ Murder victim Michéle Kiesewetter buried in her hometown. In: Heilbronner Voice , May 2, 2007.
  47. ↑ Iris Baars-Werner: City views: The two sides of the stories. In: Heilbronner Voice , November 12, 2011.
  48. ↑ Death of a Policewoman - The Short Life of Michèle Kiesewetter. ( Memento from April 25, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) In: Die Story im Erste , April 24, 2017; Annette Ramelsberger : NSU victim Kiesewetter: When evil is too banal. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 23, 2017; Tom Sundermann: Scary revue of the contradictions. In: Zeit Online , April 24, 2017.

Coordinates: 49 ° 8 '26.6 "  N , 9 ° 12' 7.4"  E