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SECT

Student charged over fatal Norway stabbing

A 23-year-old Romanian student has been charged in connection with the death of a 54-year-old man in a double stabbing incident at a hotel in eastern Norway on Monday night.

A 52-year-old woman also suffered minor injuries in the attack at Hornsjø Høyfjellshotell in Øyer, 200 kilometres north of Oslo.

Police said the stabbing occurred after a dispute between the student and the 54-year-old man, a member of staff at the Travelling Folk High School. Some thirty people connected to the school were staying at the hotel, local newspaper Gudbrandsdølen Dagningen reports.

Several armed police units arrived at the scene after receiving reports at 11.30pm of a serious stabbing incident.

The 23-year-old was arrested, while the 54-year-old victim was found critically injured after being stabbed in the back. Paramedics at the scene were unable to save his life.

The suspect faces a preliminary charge of causing bodily harm resulting in death. A remand hearing will be held on Wednesday.

The Travelling Folk High School is affiliated with Tvind, a controversial Denmark-based educational establishment set up in the 1970s to help combat poverty in the developing world. Critics have described it as a left-wing extremist sect.

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NAZIS

Germany to pay Chile Nazi sect survivors compensation

Germany said Friday it would pay compensation of up to €10,000 each to victims of the former Nazi paedophile sect "Colonia Dignidad" in Chile.

Germany to pay Chile Nazi sect survivors compensation
File picture from 2016 shows the former Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony) site, in Chile which was founded by German paedophile Paul Schäfer. Photo: EPA/Mario Ruiz/DPA

The news came the week after German prosecutors dropped their case against the sect's former doctor Hartmut Hopp, 74, citing a lack of evidence that he was complicit in the sexual abuse of children.

SEE ALSO: Germany ends probe into doctor from Chile-based Nazi sect

The sect was founded in 1961 by Paul Schäfer, a former Wehrmacht (German Army) soldier, lay preacher and convicted paedophile, who abused, drugged and indoctrinated residents and kept them as virtual slaves.

His group had close ties to the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and would torture and “disappear” regime critics.

Eligible for the payments will be some 240 German and Chilean survivors, including about 80 who now live in Germany, from a fund valued at an initial €3.5 million until 2024.

Some will also receive pension-style payments.

A long-time campaigner for the victims, German Greens lawmaker Renate Künast, labelled the payments largely “symbolic” but “acceptable”.

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights however charged that Germany's Foreign Ministry was “dodging its legal responsibility to compensate the victims” more fully, adding that “many Chilean victims were left out”.

'Violence, slave labour'

A German government and parliamentary committee in its report said Friday that Schäfer “tore families apart, abused countless children and actively collaborated with Pinochet dictatorship henchmen on torture, murder and disappearances.

“The survivors still suffer massively from the severe psychological and physical consequences after years of harm caused by violence, abuse, exploitation and slave labour.”

However, it also said that the German government “is of the opinion that no legal claims against the Federal Republic of Germany have arisen” from the abuses in Colonia Dignidad.

The support measures for victims would be paid “exclusively out of moral responsibility and without recognition of a legal obligation”, it said.

Germany's President Frank-Walter Steinmeier had acknowledged in 2016, when he was Foreign Minister, that “for many years … German diplomats at best looked the other way — and clearly did not do enough for the protection of their compatriots in this colony”.

The scale of the atrocities committed at the fenced-in mountain commune 350 kilometres south of Santiago came to light only after the end of Pinochet's regime.

Schäfer, having initially run from justice, was arrested in Argentina in 2005 and then jailed in Chile for child sexual and other abuses. He died behind bars in 2010 at the age of 88.

His right-hand man Hopp, who ran the compound's clinic, was convicted in Chile of complicity in Schaefer's sex crimes but fled to Germany in 2011 before the court ruling could be imposed.

A German court initially upheld the jail sentence but a higher court, and state prosecutors, have since found that the evidence provided by the Chilean court fell short of that required by German justice.

By Frank Zeller

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