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POLICE

Escaped mentally ill prisoner remains at large in Cologne area

Police are searching for a mentally ill prisoner convicted of killing his neighbour after he escaped from a secure psychiatric hospital in Cologne, western Germany.

Published: 8 April 2019 10:01 CEST
Escaped mentally ill prisoner remains at large in Cologne area
Photo: DPA

Otto Krüger, 67, was granted permission to temporarily leave his ward at 1:45pm on Sunday but he failed to return to the facility at the agreed time.

Now police are warning the public not to approach the man, who is dependent on medication and can be “very aggressive”.

It is thought he could be in or around the cities of Cologne and Bonn in North Rhine-Westphalia.

In 1998 the man kicked his 78-year-old neighbour to death in Bad Godesberg, south of Bonn. The following year he was placed in a closed psychiatric ward by a Bonn court.

The man had previously gone missing in December 2014 during an accompanied visit to a Christmas market. RP Online reported that he was on the run for two weeks but was caught after witnesses spotted him in a bistro.

Police have asked anyone with information on Krüger's whereabouts to contact them.

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POLICE

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

A Danish court on Thursday gave a two-month suspended prison sentence to a 31-year-old Swede for making a joke about a bomb at Copenhagen's airport this summer.

Published: 5 October 2023 17:11 CEST
Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

In late July, Pontus Wiklund, a handball coach who was accompanying his team to an international competition, said when asked by an airport agent that
a bag of balls he was checking in contained a bomb.

“We think you must have realised that it is more than likely that if you say the word ‘bomb’ in response to what you have in your bag, it will be perceived as a threat,” the judge told Wiklund, according to broadcaster TV2, which was present at the hearing.

The airport terminal was temporarily evacuated, and the coach arrested. He later apologised on his club’s website.

“I completely lost my judgement for a short time and made a joke about something you really shouldn’t joke about, especially in that place,” he said in a statement.

According to the public prosecutor, the fact that Wiklund was joking, as his lawyer noted, did not constitute a mitigating circumstance.

“This is not something we regard with humour in the Danish legal system,” prosecutor Christian Brynning Petersen told the court.

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