Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

CRIME

‘Marriage terror’ spurs axe murder in Bavaria

A Bavarian woman murdered her husband with an axe early on Monday morning after what she called “twenty-five years of marriage terror,” Bavarian police reported on Monday.

Published: 6 October 2008 14:09 CEST

The 50-year-old woman from Starnberg admitted to the axe murder during an emergency call to police on Monday morning. Officials arrived to find a “gruesome picture” in the couple’s bedroom, where the 49-year-old husband lay in bed surrounded a spray of blood, police said. The murder weapon lay nearby with a broken handle.

The couple had argued intensely on Sunday evening, and the woman left the home, returning later to kill her husband with several blows to the head. She is set to meet with a trial lawyer on Monday afternoon, authorities said.

CRIME

Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.

Published: 5 May 2024 12:52 CEST
Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.

Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.

Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.

Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.

“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.

Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.

Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.

Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.

According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.

A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.

SHOW COMMENTS