A Greek courted has sentenced a 47-year-old German man to life in prison for the murder of his wife. The man remained living in an apartment together with the corpse of his 54-year-old dead wife, which lay surrounded by flowers, dolls and stuffed animals. The man was arrested in the small northern town of Asprovalta last February and stood trial in the city of Thessaloniki.
The woman came from Düsseldorf and met her husband in 2001. The couple moved to Greece in 2006. According to the Greek to police, both became alcoholics and were often seen fighting with each other. The couple had a fight in which the woman was severely injured and left unattended for 24 hours, during which period she died.
The man’s defence said that he was psychologically unstable and therefore not in control of his actions. The judge rejected the claim.
A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.
The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.
Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.
Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.
Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.
“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.
Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.
Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.
Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.
According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.
A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.
According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.
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