Munich (dpa / lby) - Crimes commissioned by the state are increasingly occupying the German judiciary. The President of the Higher Regional Court (OLG) Munich, Hans-Joachim Hessler, spoke on Friday of a "questionable trend". It is not only the number of procedures that is currently striking, but also the quality of the deeds involved.
The trial of the planned murder of a Chechen opposition figure is currently underway at the Higher Regional Court. The accused is a Russian citizen and, according to the federal prosecutor, is said to have prepared the act on behalf of a cousin of the Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov, who is loyal to Putin and who is associated with the murders of several critics.
The case is similar to the so-called Tiergarten murder in Berlin. A Russian man was sentenced to life imprisonment in mid-December 2021 for the shooting of a Georgian in August 2019 in the Kleiner Tiergarten park. The verdict referred to "state terrorism".
In April, the Munich Higher Regional Court sentenced a Russian scientist from the University of Augsburg to a suspended prison sentence of one year for acting as an agent for the Russian foreign intelligence service. In December 2021, a couple was sentenced to suspended sentences for spying for a Chinese secret service. The man received two years and his partner a year and a half of probation.
The fact that several cases of this type are pending in the court in such a short time is unusual, and cases of espionage or state commissioned acts are actually rather rare, said court spokesman Florian Gliwitzky. Since a former employee of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2016 for years of working as a spy, mainly for the US secret service CIA, there has been a big gap at the Munich Higher Regional Court as far as such procedures are concerned - now there is it heaped them.
