A 48-year-old man was acquitted of charges of involvement in attempted murder by the Vienna Regional Court on Tuesday afternoon, after being sentenced to 11 years in prison in the first trial in February 2022. The judgment is final.
The man who was sentenced to eleven years in prison in February 2022 was acquitted on Tuesday. He may have been wrongly convicted, it turned out, because prosecutor Kerstin Wagner-Haase accepted the jury’s decision. She waived her appeal in court, meaning the acquittal is legally binding.
Applause and tears
The jury’s decision was not unanimous. Five rejected the charges, but three were convinced by the prosecutor that the 48-year-old was involved in the accused murder plot. The man’s relatives, who had been anxiously awaiting the verdict, responded to the outcome of the trial with applause and tears of relief.
New evidence
Based on new evidence, the Vienna Supreme Court (OLG) approved the reopening of the proceedings, released the man in May 2022 after 18 months of detention and ordered a new trial. The case in question concerns a murder attempt in the Hippgasse in Ottakring in the early morning of November 20, 2018. A man was knocked down with an elongated tubular tool and suffered life-threatening injuries, including traumatic brain injury and a skull fracture. . The 48-year-old was then suspected of having paid a fine of 10,000 euros to the direct perpetrator, who was serving a life sentence for attempted murder.
“Already in the first legal process I was convinced that it was him. “I am now too,” emphasizes Public Prosecutor Wagner-Haase in her closing speech. The credibility of the witnesses who acquitted the suspect was “a bit poor”. It is “a very special procedure”. The assassination victim survived “thanks to the best medical care and somewhat of a miracle. But his life is irreparably destroyed. He is constantly dependent on outside help.” The suspect concluded: “I have nothing to do with the case. I am innocent.”
New evidence led to the original verdict being overturned and the trial reopened, suggesting the 48-year-old had likely been deliberately falsely accused by the murder plot’s mastermind. Two witnesses who had contact with the mastermind in prison, who has been sentenced to life in prison for inciting attempted murder, claim that he confessed to them that he had involved the 48-year-old man in the case out of revenge.
Father-in-law ordered an assassination attempt
As the investigation into the attack in November 2018 revealed, the former father-in-law of the dejected and seriously injured man ordered the attack – out of hurt honor because he had engaged in an extramarital affair with his sister-in-law and also fathered a child with her. This did not please the Turkish-born real estate entrepreneur who had arranged his daughter’s marriage at all and that is why he wanted to have his ex-son-in-law removed.
For this he looked for a murderer, whom he found after a long search for a corresponding fee. After the assassination attempt failed, those responsible were identified and arrested after a lengthy investigation. The victim’s ex-father-in-law was convicted of incitement to murder by the Vienna Regional Court in October 2019, and the direct perpetrator was convicted of attempted murder last February.
Source: Krone
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