BERLIN –
An 80-year-old former officer with communist East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, went on trial Thursday over the killing of a Polish man at a border crossing in divided Berlin 50 years in the past.
The defendant, whose title has not been launched in line with German privateness guidelines, is charged with homicide earlier than the state courtroom in Berlin.
He didn’t communicate because the trial opened, however his lawyer mentioned that her shopper contests the accusations towards him, German information company dpa reported. There aren’t any formal pleas within the German authorized system.
Prosecutors introduced their indictment in October.
The case goes again to March 29, 1974, when a 38-year-old Polish man allegedly took a faux bomb to the Polish Embassy to threaten officers to permit him to go away to West Berlin and the Stasi determined to fake it was authorizing his departure.
He was supplied with exit paperwork and accompanied to a border crossing on the Friedrichstrasse railway station in East Berlin, in keeping with prosecutors.
The defendant – who was 31 on the time – was tasked with rendering the Polish man “innocent,” prosecutors have mentioned. After the Pole had handed the ultimate checkpoint, the suspect allegedly shot him within the again from a hiding place.
The courtroom has scheduled seven trial classes via Could 23.
Authorities made little headway with the case till a decisive tip on the identification of the shooter emerged in 2016 from the Stasi’s voluminous archives, dpa reported. Prosecutors initially suspected the case would quantity to manslaughter, which in contrast to homicide falls beneath the statute of limitations in Germany.
East Germany constructed the Berlin Wall in 1961, stopping most of its residents from travelling to the West. Many tried to flee by tunnelling beneath it, swimming previous it, climbing or flying over it. Not less than 140 folks died within the try.
The closely fortified border was opened on Nov. 9, 1989, a key second within the collapse of communism in Europe. Germany was reunited lower than a 12 months later.