Magdeburg (dpa/sa) - In a new edition of the trial surrounding the death of a hotelier in Osterweddingen (Börde district), the regional court has sentenced two men to joint murder instead of manslaughter as before. The reasoning on Tuesday said that the court assumed that the 22 and 24-year-old defendants had acted from the basest of motives. "There was a blatant disproportion between the reason for the crime and the result. A person was beaten to death because he confronted the accused because they had previously committed damage to property," said a court spokesman.
The younger of the two accused was sentenced to eight years and six months in prison, the older to nine years and six months. In the case of the adult defendant in particular, the court took into account that he was less criminally responsible because he was significantly under the influence of alcohol. Therefore, despite the murder conviction, life imprisonment was not imposed. The judgment can be appealed again.
In this new trial, the court essentially only had to decide whether it was murder or manslaughter. In September 2021, the court had imposed a youth sentence of six years and ten months and a prison sentence of seven years and ten months on the two men for manslaughter. The Federal Court of Justice partially overturned the judgment due to revisions.
Last year, the verdict found that the two young men had beaten the hotelier to death in October 2020. Both had been found to have high blood alcohol levels. According to the court's findings, in the early morning of October 16, the men had parked their car in a hotel parking lot in Osterweddingen. After getting out, they stepped on a wooden fence and knocked off the mirror of another car.
Because of the loud music from the car, the hotelier's wife woke up and woke her husband. He then went downstairs and confronted the rioters. The two attacked the 58-year-old, grabbed him in a wrestler's grip, punched and kicked the victim's head. Among other things, the hotelier suffered brain swelling, vomited and choked on the contents of his stomach.
