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Truck driver admits to murdering jogger outside Freiburg

A Romanian truck driver confessed to the murder of a female jogger as his trial opened in Freiburg on Wednesday, after also coming under suspicion for the 2014 killing of a French exchange student in Austria.

Published: 22 November 2017 10:42 CET

Truck driver admits to murdering jogger outside Freiburg

Catalin C. in court in Freiburg. Photo: DPA

The accused, 40-year-old Catalin C., faces charges of aggravated rape and murder over the death last November of a 27-year-old German woman who had gone for an afternoon run.

The suspect told the court in the southwestern city of Freiburg that he attacked the woman with a bottle and that he was “shocked” by his own actions.

“What I have done is unforgivable,” he said.

He denied having a sexual motive for the crime, as alleged by the prosecution.

Prosecutors claim that Catalin C. raped the young woman and then beat her with an iron rod until she died. It took days and a large search operation before her body was found in the woods outside Freiburg.

Catalin C. was arrested in June and investigators have since said that forensic evidence links him to the unsolved murder of a 20-year-old French exchange student in the Austrian town of Kufstein in 2014.

The woman, from the French city of Lyon, was also raped before she was killed.

A verdict in the case of the German jogger is expected in late December.

Only once the German ruling is final can the accused be handed over to Austrian authorities to potentially face judicial proceedings there, a Freiburg court spokesman told DPA news agency.

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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