A woman employee at the social court housed in the building was hit by the 150-kilo pane of glass as she went into work on Monday morning.

“She is a large, fit woman, and was able to briefly hold the window and twist herself away to the side so it only hit her on the shoulder and foot,” Sandra Bolten, spokeswoman for the court told Thursday’s Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper.

Just a few months ago all 2,000 windows in the state justice ministry complex were inspected and more than 200 replaced after judges and staff sweated their way through the summer with the windows closed because of construction problems.

Now staff are outraged that the problem was obviously not fixed then – and they are again banned from opening the windows themselves.

Employees of the building management firm HSG Zander have been put on call to open windows as and when the government workers ask.

Wiesbaden police have launched an investigation into why the window was faulty, despite it being inspected just months earlier, as have HSG Zander. The process could take a while though, a company spokesman said.

The complex was built by a private contractor as a Public-Private Partnership, the Frankfurter Rundschau said. Around a million euros are thought to have been saved by contracting the windows from a Chinese company rather than one from nearby Mainz.

Siegfried Huhle, head of the local craft guild, said he had watched the construction of the complex two years ago, and that there had been problems with the windows from the beginning.

“It was a difficult business from the start,” he told the paper.

Now the problem is that the windows cannot simply be sent back to China, he said.

The Local/jcw