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Flowers, candles and signs lie and stand at the place where a man died after a police check on May 2nd, 2022.
© René Priebe/PR video /dpa
The fatal police operation in Mannheim in May 2022 sparked protests and political discussions.
Medical reports could ultimately be central to the verdict in the proceedings.
Mannheim - The prosecution's report was presented in the trial against two police officers before the Mannheim regional court for a fatal operation in May 2022.
The mentally ill 47-year-old died of a "positional and fixation-related breathing impairment" with subsequent metabolic imbalance in combination with suffocation due to bleeding into the upper respiratory tract, as Kathrin Yen, medical director of the Institute for Forensic Medicine and Traffic Medicine, said on Wednesday.
The cause of the blood in the respiratory tract was again a nosebleed after a blow to the head.
It was an “unnatural death”.
The man with Croatian roots collapsed during a violent operation by the two officers on Mannheim's market square and died in hospital.
He suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, had recurring delusions and hallucinated.
The defense, however, refers to a report it commissioned, according to which the man died of cardiac arrest following circulatory failure.
According to the public prosecutor's office, the man's doctor at the Central Institute for Mental Health in Mannheim asked the police for help in May 2022.
The doctor was afraid that his patient was endangering himself.
Various videos, including those from surveillance cameras, show how one of the police officers grabs the victim and how the man breaks away before he is overpowered.
The officer brings the man to the ground together with his colleague, he fixes the man lying on his stomach with his knee and punches him in the face.
The overwhelmed man bleeds from his nose and remains on his stomach for a few minutes.
Then he doesn't move anymore.
According to forensic medicine, the victim had pathological changes to his heart and had taken several psychotropic medications.
He was agitated and needed more air, the expert said.
The overweight man was lying on his stomach with his hands behind his back, pressed to the floor.
“You also have a very strong urge to breathe, which wasn’t possible here,” said Yen.
“Previous illnesses play a certain role.
(...) But the circumstances of the case cannot be ignored.”
The older of the police officers is currently suspended from duty and has to answer, among other things, for assault in office resulting in death.
The younger police officer is charged with negligent homicide by omission.
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The story is reminiscent of the case of George Floyd, who was pressed to the ground by a police officer in the USA in May 2020 until he could no longer breathe and died.
The Mannheim process is scheduled to be completed at the beginning of March.
dpa