During the trial, there was a handshake between the perpetrator and the victim – “Forgiveness is a Christian duty”. An 87-year-old sacristan suffered a skull fracture at the end of September after a Romanian beggar beat him with an iron bar. The reason for the bloody deed: the beggar received no money from the sexton. The suspect pleaded guilty in court on Thursday morning and expressed remorse.
“If I don’t forgive him, nothing will change. Forgiveness is a Christian duty” – Mesner Franz Huber (87) shook hands with his attacker, who had broken his skull with three strong blows with an iron bar, in the regional court in Ried. “Everything happens according to God’s plan. But we humans often don’t understand him,” says the Innviertler, describing the attack on September 29 before judge Claudia Grillneder. As is often the case, the Romanian beggar (26) had left him behind.
“I gave him something several times, but then I sent him away,” reports Huber. He advised unemployed people, who had just gambled away their last money in the casino, to look for work. The sacristan sat on the first pew in St. Valentine’s Church in Braunau, bowed his head to the rosary – in the middle of prayer he felt a violent blow to the head, after which the offender covered his mouth.
The suspect confessed to stabbing the 12-inch iron bar and hitting it three times. The attacker fled, the victim dragged himself out covered in blood. Where Huber met his “guardian angel” who had just come out of an inn and cried out for rescue. Before this came, the sacristan closed the church and, even after his stay in the hospital, immediately went back to the service of God.
The sentence was 30 months unconditional imprisonment – the maximum sentence would have been 10 years. The defendant accepted, but District Attorney Petra Stranzinger appealed that it was too lenient on her — and therefore not legally binding.
Source: Krone

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