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Alleged sect leader Sylvia D .: "God used to work in Jesus, today in Sylvia D."
Photo: Boris Roessler / dpa
God be Lord of life and death.
That was one of many meaningful sentences that Sylvia D. had addressed in her so-called Last Word at the end of the pleading to the 1st major criminal chamber.
Her hope of acquittal seemed great.
The accusation that she should be responsible for the death of the four-year-old Jan on August 17, 1988 in her house, she disgusted.
At 10.17 am this hope was shattered when the presiding judge Peter Graßmück announced: "The defendant Sylvia D. is guilty of murder and is sentenced to life imprisonment".
Due to the great public interest, the Hanau District Court has moved the venue from the Justice Center to the Congress Park Hanau (CPH) in the old town.
Where the city councilors normally discuss, Sylvia D. is now sitting in a bronze-colored costume at a table in front of the stage, across from the chamber, with the audience behind her.
A seating arrangement that Judge Graßmück should have come in handy in his one-and-a-half-hour verdict.
Again and again he speaks directly to the 73-year-old, who gently shakes her head at certain points, insistently and full of conviction that she deliberately killed the four-year-old because he was "the disruptive factor in the community you dominated".
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