Enlarge image
Defendant Klaus S. with his defense lawyers Jörg Becker (left) and Steffen Lindberg
Photo: Uwe Anspach / picture alliance / dpa / dpa pool
His lawyers were deep down.
Nothing is more embarrassing than loudly propagating the innocence of a defendant before the start of the trial and receiving a guilty verdict at the end.
But now Jörg Becker and Steffen Lindberg, who are defending Klaus S. in Room 1 of the Heidelberg Regional Court, are sure of their case. They tear apart the evidence - and demand an acquittal for the 66-year-old as well as financial compensation for his time in prison.
Klaus S. is charged with causing an explosive explosion, dangerous physical harm and attempted serious physical harm.
He is said to have sent letter bombs on February 15 this year: to the beverage manufacturer ADM Wild in Eppelheim in the Rhein-Neckar district, to the Lidl headquarters in Neckarsulm near Heilbronn and to the baby food manufacturer Hipp in Pfaffenhofen in Upper Bavaria.
Four people were injured while accepting or opening explosive mail.
According to the indictment, the pensioner wanted to force the companies to pay him money.
"What a perfidious device"
"He's not a bomber," says lawyer Becker of the man who is sitting to his right and who has protested his innocence since his arrest.
Rather, the public prosecutor's office "got completely lost and lost ground of objectivity," said Lindberg.
Shortly after the arrest he, Becker, signaled to the investigative authorities: "I think you got the wrong guy." Nobody was interested.
It is a circumstantial trial that is nearing its end with a bang: even the private prosecutor's attorney is not convinced of the defendant's guilt.
Anke Stiefel-Bechdolf, an experienced criminal defense attorney, represents three victims and speaks in her plea of how injured her clients are.
They would have wished to be confronted with a perpetrator who gave them an explanation, a motive, a background for what happened to them;
that he takes responsibility and dispels their fears.
Age, height and gait examined
"Letter bombs - what a perfidious device," shouts Stiefel-Bechdolf.
The perpetrator does not know who will get hold of the dangerous package.
"He doesn't really care who it hits." This arbitrariness makes the act "so bad," she says, and does something that is rather unusual for the secondary prosecution: She does not file a motion for the pensioner to be convicted - and thus confronts the arguments against the public prosecutor's office.
more on the subject
Trial in Heidelberg: letter bombs against Lidl and Hipp - defendant released
Trial in Heidelberg: Defendant denies explosives attacks on food companies
Pensioners are said to have sent explosive devices to Lidl and Hipp: The parcel bomber by Julia Jüttner
Chief Public Prosecutor Lars-Jörgen Birthig, however, remains: Klaus S. did not come into the focus of the investigative authorities by chance, he was the man in the surveillance video of a post office in Ulm that shows the perpetrator posting three parcels.
For almost an hour and a half, Natali struggled to interpret the results of the evidence in his favor: the age, height, face, hair, clothing and gait of the man in the video compared to those of the accused.
Natal used many minutes to explain the different shapes of auricle, as a tiny sequence of a piece of the perpetrator's ear can be seen in the video.
Crime clothes not found
He quotes witnesses who were heard in court and who identified Klaus S.
He recalls the parcels that Klaus S. had at home to send model buses to other collectors;
of the tools that Klaus S. neatly kept in his workshop and of his ability as an electrician to build explosive devices.
In fact, however, 45,000 boxes of the kind that S. had at home were produced, says Becker, his defense lawyer.
31,996 of these were sold in Germany.
An expert opinion proves that with the tool in S. '
Workshop none of the bombs were tinkered with.
Likewise, the DNA, finger and hair traces found on the parcels do not come from Klaus S. The crime clothes could not be found either during a house search or elsewhere.
The matchstick used to build the bombs is not identical to the matchsticks that S. had at home.
"Typical retirement day"
Becker settles accounts with the BAO, the special organizational structure of the police, a kind of special commission that consulted a "super-recognizer" when identifying the person on the surveillance video.
She juggled technical terms in the court and bragged about her qualifications, but was unable to really substantiate her assessment.
Becker also criticizes the radio cell query, which showed that S. had spent his cell phone after a “typical retirement day”: a car dealership in the morning, then a walk in the woods, then a gas station and from 12.27 p.m. at home with his wife.
According to the investigators, however, S. had received the explosive letter bombs from a previously unknown accomplice in the forest and deliberately left his cell phone at home when he went to the post office.
Becker describes with sarcasm how the investigators S. '
Area searched for cats after a cat's hair was seized from a bomb.
In vain.
»Pseudoscientific Methods«
Steffen Lindberg, the second defense attorney, sums up how the investigators used an alleged expert with so-called mantrailing dogs in the search for clues.
The lawyer speaks of a "dog healer from the Orient" who tried to sell herself "rhetorically polished" in the process.
An appraiser from the Helmholtz Institute confirmed that the expert had serious deficits in the process, and that her work was grossly flawed, unprofessional and meaningless.
Lindberg speaks of "sham evidence and pseudoscientific methods".
Released from custody
The chief public prosecutor is not to be shaken by this.
"There are no coincidences," he states and demands a prison sentence of four and a half years and a fine for illegally possessing ammunition.
In October, Klaus S. was released from pretrial detention after 228 days after several expert reports raised doubts about the urgent suspicion that is a prerequisite for pre-trial detention.
Including that of an anthropologist who used body features to explain why Klaus S. couldn't be the man who can be seen on the video in the post office.
"So that thoughts can change their direction"
"The head is round so that the thoughts can change their direction," warns defense attorney Becker on the penultimate day of the negotiations.
He had hoped that this would also apply to the chief public prosecutor.
Instead, he wanted to have Klaus S. observed after his release in October.
However, the criminal chamber refused to do so.
She wants to announce the verdict on Friday.