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Martin Ney (left) before the Stade Regional Court in 2011
Photo: Carmen Jaspersen / picture alliance / dpa
The felon Martin Ney, extradited to France on suspicion of murder, is back in Germany. This emerges from a letter from the Lower Saxony judiciary that SPIEGEL has received. Accordingly, the sex offender was handed over to the German authorities in the border town of Kehl on Monday and initially transferred to a prison in Offenburg. From there, Ney is to be brought back to the Celle correctional facility, where he had been imprisoned for almost nine years.
At the beginning of 2012, the Stade District Court sentenced Ney to life imprisonment and determined the severity of the guilt.
The former employee of educational institutions had only been arrested the year before and had confessed to having brought three underage boys under his control and murdered between 1992 and 2001.
He also admitted to having sexually abused around 40 minors in almost two decades.
Many of these cases were statute-barred.
Boy kidnapped from dormitory
Ney, who went down in German criminal history as the "masked man", was transferred to the French judiciary on January 20 of this year. The Nantes public prosecutor accuses the serial killer of another brutal crime that has remained unsolved for more than 17 years. Accordingly, on the night of April 7, 2004, Ney is said to have kidnapped the then ten-year-old Jonathan C. from the dormitory of a holiday camp in Saint-Brevin-les-Pins on the Atlantic Ocean and later murdered him. The boy's body was discovered in a pond six weeks after the kidnapping.
The main basis for Ney's extradition were statements made by a former inmate at the Celle prison.
During interrogations by German police officers in 2017, this witness alleged that Ney had confessed to him against five other unsolved murders, including one in France.
According to information from SPIEGEL, the examining magistrate in Nantes has not yet been able to prove the offense to the accused during the eight-month extradition time.
The preliminary investigation in France continues;
It is still unclear whether the "mask man" will be charged.
Ney denies all allegations.
