Frankfurt/Main (dpa/lhe) – A man was sentenced to eleven years in prison for his part in a robbery of a Frankfurt optician in January 1994. The district court in Frankfurt assumed robbery resulting in death on Tuesday, but not robbery and murder. The prosecution had asked for life imprisonment for murder, the defense requested acquittal. The verdict is not yet legally binding.
The optician was attacked and robbed by two perpetrators in his shop in downtown Frankfurt. The 60-year-old was tied up, choked and stabbed six times. According to the verdict, the deadly knife wounds were not clearly attributable to the 48-year-old German defendant. They could also have come from the accomplice, who is still on the run. It is also not clear whether the accused would have approved of the fatal stabbing. Only the strangling of the victim had to be attributed to him according to the verdict.
After the crime, both perpetrators initially escaped. The accused lived undisturbed in Ober-Ramstadt in southern Hesse, where he was only arrested in March last year. Investigations against him got underway again in 2018 after he gave a fingerprint as part of a drug criminal investigation, which resulted in a hit in the criminal police database.
Attempts to get hold of the man’s accomplices failed. During the trial, the defendant remained silent about the charge. The exact sequence of events in the optician’s shop could therefore no longer be clarified, the judgment said. The perpetrators had stolen 1,000 marks in cash and the wallet of the victim with ID and bank cards.