Acquittal in the murder trial of the man shot in Vienna 15 years ago

2023-12-05 16:54:00

The jury unanimously rejected the charges in the murder trial. Public prosecutor Bernd Ziska accepted this decision and issued a waiver of appeal in the courtroom. The acquittal is therefore already legally binding.

“You will now be released from custody,” the presiding judge told the native Algerian. He thanked the court profusely before he was taken away by the judicial guard.

The subject of the proceedings was the violent death of an Algerian man, 38 years old at the time of the crime, whose body was discovered by a truck driver on a park bench near the Reichsbrücke on December 19, 2008. The man bled to death as a result of a gunshot wound. An autopsy revealed that someone had shot him in the right thigh with a pistol, causing the projectile to rupture the artery. The man who was shot dragged himself to a park bench, leaving a 20-meter-long trail of blood behind him. He died there, although according to forensic pathologist Nikolaus Klupp, at least three minutes must have passed from the time he was hit in the leg before the injured man lost consciousness due to the heavy loss of blood.

“Lesson he won’t forget for the rest of his life”

The defendant, who was searched for years in vain with an international arrest warrant before he was arrested in Stockholm on June 7th of this year, denied in the circumstantial evidence trial that he was even at the crime scene. The public prosecutor, on the other hand, was convinced that the man had shot the victim twice, with one shot missing: “There is no clear evidence, but a dense network of evidence.” The prosecution could neither rely on direct witnesses nor was there any material evidence directly incriminating the defendant in the form of DNA traces or fingerprints on the two cartridge cases seized at the crime scene, the corpse or the clothing of the person killed. However, the defendant and the victim knew each other and – as evidence revealed, some of which were received anonymously by the police after media publications about the homicide – had had several arguments in the weeks before, which degenerated into fistfights. It was said that after the last physical altercation at the beginning of December 2008, the defendant announced that he would teach his opponent “a lesson that he will never forget as long as he lives,” the public prosecutor quoted from a witness statement.

From the prosecutor’s point of view, another argument against the defendant was that he had fled abroad after the murder. The 47-year-old had most recently lived in Sweden as a so-called submariner without a legal residence permit and was extradited by the Swedish authorities after his arrest.

“How can I kill a person?”

“I didn’t murder anyone, I swear by all the saints,” the defendant assured in almost first-class German – he had applied for asylum in Austria in 2000, which was legally rejected. He met the man who was killed in the Stein prison, where both were serving a prison sentence – one for drug offenses, the other for property crimes. After his release, the compatriot wanted to live with him, which he refused, and his acquaintance insulted him violently. The defendant admitted that he hit him on the head with a beer bottle because he would not tolerate insults directed at his family. However, he did not summon the then 38-year-old to the Reichsbrücke for a late-night discussion and/or tried to kill him: “I have never killed a single dog. How can I kill a person?”

“The evidence is not even remotely suitable for convicting him of murder,” said the 47-year-old’s procedural assistant, Viennese lawyer Florian Horak. The murder weapon was never found, but the genetic characteristics of another person were discovered on a pair of scissors that the victim had with him, along with his DNA. “These do not match those of the defendant. It can therefore be ruled out that the defendant is the cause of this trace,” Horak referred to a corresponding DNA report. There was also not a single indication on the defendant’s cell phone that he had communicated with the man who was killed on December 19, 2008 or shortly before. “There is no evidence that the defendant was at the crime scene,” Horak said.

However, the criminal investigators had also read the victim’s cell phone. A text message sent by him to an uninvolved third party showed that he had arranged a meeting with a certain Omar – the defendant’s first name – on the Danube a few hours before his death. The man who was killed had also saved the number of Omar in his cell phone – it was obvious to public prosecutor Ziska that this was the defendant. The man who was killed called this number nine times between 6:50 p.m. and 7:20 p.m. on the evening of December 18, 2008, but each time it ended up on the mobile phone.

The defendant stated that he had long since passed on his SIM card and was using a different phone number. The fact that the man who died wanted to meet an Omar basically means nothing: “There are thousands of Omars. That’s as common as Hans or Franz or Robert.”

“If it wasn’t you, then who did it?” finally asked the presiding judge, Wolfgang Etl. “I don’t know,” replied the 47-year-old. When asked why he had left Austria, the man replied that he was “not treated well” here. He was sentenced to lengthy prison terms several times for theft. He “just stole to have something to eat, but not with any intention of enriching himself.”

With one exception, none of the witnesses invited appeared. All of them had belonged to the Algerian community in Vienna at the time of the crime, but most of them have now been lost. The information you provided at the time, which had been recorded in writing, was therefore read out.