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CRIME

Kidnapped German doctor held in France for 1982 murder

A German doctor who was kidnapped and taken to France was ordered held Wednesday on a warrant issued following his conviction for the 1982 murder of a French girl, a judicial official said.

Kidnapped German doctor held in France for 1982 murder
Photo: DPA

A bail judge held a hearing at the Hotel-Dieu hospital in Paris and ruled that German cardiologist Dieter Krombach should be held under the warrant issued following his 1995 conviction by a French court.

Due to the injuries he suffered during the kidnapping, Krombach, 74, will remain in hospital.

French prosecutors on Tuesday pressed preliminary charges against the father of the murdered girl, Frenchman Andre Bamberski, 74, for Krombach’s kidnapping and beating.

Krombach was found before dawn on Sunday in a doorway in the eastern French city of Mulhouse, just over the German border, bound and gagged and bleeding from a head injury.

A French court in 1995 convicted the doctor in absentia of manslaughter over the death of 14-year-old Kalinka Bamberski, his stepdaughter, who died at his home in Lindau in Germany in 1982 after he gave her a mysterious injection.

Berlin had refused to hand him over to the French courts, who sentenced him to 15 years of jail, on the grounds that he had already been tried and acquitted in Germany.

Bamberski, who had long pressed for Krombach’s arrest, told journalists after being released on bail that he had ordered the doctor’s kidnapping and delivery to France, but denied ordering him to be beaten.

The German doctor won a 2001 case against France before the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that he had been denied a fair hearing and the right to an appeal in the case.

A German court convicted the cardiologist in 1997 of sexually abusing a 16-year-old patient after injecting her with anaesthetic in his surgery. He was handed a two-year suspended sentence and stripped of his licence.

In 2007 he was convicted of fraud for continuing to practice illegally.

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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.

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.

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