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Two go on trial for brutal ‘homophobic’ murder of 1990s pop star in Berlin hostel

On Wednesday the trial started of two men who allegedly sexually assaulted pop singer Jim Reeves so violently last year that he died a painful death due to the injuries.

Published: 13 September 2017 16:00 CEST

Two go on trial for brutal ‘homophobic’ murder of 1990s pop star in Berlin hostel

Jim Reeves. Photo: DPA

The two Polish defendants, aged 23 and 30, maintained their silence on the first day of the murder trial in a Berlin court.

They are accused of torturing the 47-year-old Reeves to death in a six-bed hostel room in the Charlottenburg district in January 2016. Prosecutors argue that there was a homophobic motive behind the crime.

According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Reeves was staying in the hostel after recently splitting up with his partner. On the morning of February 1st another hostel guest found him dead.

The two defendants reportedly told police investigators after their arrests that they had felt insulted by Reeves, who they claimed had attempted to chat them up.

A postmortem showed that Reeves had been horrifically tortured before his death. His attackers had raped him using a large object and the assault was so violent that he died due to internal bleeding.

The two defendants were passing through Berlin at the time of the crime. Police in Poland arrested one of them a few weeks later. Once he had served time for a different crime in Poland he was extradited to Germany. The other man was arrested in Spain at a later date after attempting to flee with €7,000 in cash.

Reeves was the front man of the eurodance band Squeezer, which hit the peak of its popularity in the late 1990s. They sold over a million records worldwide, with their biggest hit Sweet Kisses hitting the top of the singles charts in Spain in 1996.

German prosecutors drop investigation into 'unforeseeable' flood disaster

The public prosecutor’s office in Koblenz has closed the investigation into the deadly flood disaster in the Ahr valley that occurred in the summer of 2021.

A sufficient suspicion against the former Ahr district administrator Jürgen Pföhler (CDU) and an employee from the crisis team has not arisen, announced the head of the public prosecutor’s office in Koblenz, Mario Mannweiler, on Thursday.

Following the flood disaster in the Ahr region in Rhineland-Palatinate – in which 136 people died in Germany and thousands of homes were destroyed – there were accusations that the district of Ahrweiler, with Pföhler at the helm, had acted too late in sending flood warnings.

An investigation on suspicion of negligent homicide in 135 cases began in August of 2021. Pföhler had always denied the allegations.

READ ALSO: UPDATE – German prosecutors consider manslaughter probe into deadly floods

The public prosecutor’s office came to the conclusion that it was an extraordinary natural disaster: “The 2021 flood far exceeded anything people had experienced before and was subjectively unimaginable for residents, those affected, emergency services and those responsible for operations alike,” the authority said.

Civil protections in the district of Ahrweiler, including its disaster warning system, were found to be insufficient.

READ ALSO: Germany knew its disaster warning system wasn’t good enough – why wasn’t it improved?

But from the point of view of the public prosecutor’s office, these “quite considerable deficiencies”, which were identified by an expert, did not constitute criminal liability.

Why did the case take so long?

The investigations had dragged on partly because they were marked by considerable challenges, said the head of the Rhineland-Palatinate State Criminal Police Office, Mario Germano. “Namely, to conduct investigations in an area marked by the natural disaster and partially destroyed. Some of the people we had to interrogate were severely traumatised.”

More than 300 witnesses were heard including firefighters, city workers and those affected by the flood. More than 20 terabytes of digital data had been secured and evaluated, and more than 300 gigabytes were deemed relevant to the proceedings.

Pföhler, who stopped working as the district administrator in August 2021 due to illness, stepped down from the role in October 2021 citing an incapacity for duty.

The conclusion of the investigation had been postponed several times, in part because the public prosecutor’s office wanted to wait for the outcome of the investigative committee in the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament.

READ ALSO: Volunteer army rebuilds Germany’s flood-stricken towns

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