The Hamburg Regional Court has sentenced a 71-year-old bank robber to twelve and a half years in prison with subsequent preventive detention. The court found it proven that the man robbed three Hamburger Sparkassen and shot a bank employee.
"This was an attempted murder of greed and to enable a criminal offense," said the Judge Birgit Woitas to the verdict. "We're not saying it was your intention to kill this man in any case, but you fired and targeted him," she said to the defendant. He had accepted that he could meet and kill the man.
The last German living in Kiel was accused among other things of heavy predatory extortion and attempted murder. He had raided between 2011 and 2019 three Hamburger Sparkassen branches and thereby captured about 25 000 euros. In one of his raids he had shot at a bank employee and hit him in the stomach. The man survived only thanks to an emergency operation.
Excessive last word
The deeds had the red-spoken 71-year-old confessed during the process, but a killing intention denied. He extended his last word to five days and ended with the judge withdrawing his speech because he repeated himself several times and made rambling remarks.
The aged criminal had repeatedly filed applications of bias during the trial and commented on the investigation, the reporting of him, the opinion of a psychiatrist and his raids with long monologues. Even during the verdict, he spoke several times between the presiding judge.
Man should have personality disorder
The criminal court certifies the man mental problems. He was not crazy, but guilty, but the personality disorder with narcissistic and paranoid shares was "written on his forehead", said the judge. He considers himself the "legal enemy number one" because of his partly justified complaints during former prison stays.
Nevertheless, the prosecutor had demanded a prison sentence of 12 years and 10 months and requested subsequent preventive detention. The defender had not filed a specific criminal complaint.
It is not the first prison sentence for the 71-year-old. Since the 1970s, he committed bank robberies and sat for several times in prison. At the beginning of the current trial he had posed with a file folder with a newspaper article cut out: "Bankers are bunkering one billion euros for their pensions."
