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The murderer in court in summer 2020: The 56-year-old is on the run
Photo: Bernd Thissen / dpa
A convicted murderer took off his ankle bracelets in Münster and fled shortly before he should have been imprisoned.
As a spokesman for the Münster police said, the man is now being sought.
The »Bild« had previously reported.
In January, around 27 years after the violent death of the then 16-year-old high school student Nicole Denise Schalla in Dortmund, the man was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Because the judiciary saw no risk of escape and the verdict was not yet final, the man remained free after the guilty verdict and was given an ankle cuff.
As a spokesman for the public prosecutor said, the judgment became final a few days ago after a decision by the Federal Court of Justice.
The public prosecutor's office was informed on Tuesday - whereupon they wanted to have the detention carried out.
According to "Bild" the man took off his ankle cuffs on Tuesday evening at 8:10 p.m. and left his cell phone behind.
According to the dpa news agency, the police are checking information to start a public manhunt with photos of the man.
16 year old abused and strangled
The man from North Rhine-Westphalia had overpowered Nicole Denise Schalla in 1993 not far from a bus stop near her home in the west of Dortmund. Schalla's body was eventually discovered in a bush near an elementary school. The youth had been abused and strangled.
The murderer, who has now been convicted, was arrested in the summer of 2018 after subsequent DNA analyzes of crime scene traces revealed a hit.
The Dortmund prosecutors had to struggle with particular difficulties in the Schalla case: Since the body was lying in the rain, many traces were washed away over several hours.
The investigators tracked the man down with a new type of investigation method that had only recently been used in North Rhine-Westphalia.
A single flake of skin secured to the exposed portion of the corpse was overwhelmingly from the defendant.
The man had always denied the act.
ptz / dpa
