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CRIME

CDU politician ‘shot dead in garage’

UPDATE: A long-serving politician was shot dead on Monday night in his garage in central Germany, police said. The main suspect is a former colleague, who killed himself in front of officers hours later.

Published: 29 January 2014 07:00 CET
CDU politician 'shot dead in garage'
Wolfgang Potinius was killed on Monday night. Photo: GZ-W.de/DPA

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Identified by the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper as Wolfgang Potinius, the Christian Union (CDU) politician was found by police in his garage with gunshot wounds to his head and chest on Monday at 7.45pm. He died shortly after they arrived.

Inspectors in the Nidda area near Frankfurt, Hesse, soon turned their efforts towards finding a 56-year-old suspect. He and Potinius had both been involved in running different healthcare centres in the area.

His family members said he had gone missing that evening.

The suspected killer, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported, appeared in a state court six years earlier under suspicion of fraud. The case did not go to trial, the former personnel boss had to pay €1,200 and do 250 hours of community service.

He then moved over to working in Wetterau, where Potinius was head of the town's clinic.

Police went straight to his house in the town of Neu-Anspach, and at around 1.30am on Tuesday, he turned up with a gun outside the building.

Despite efforts from officers to get the man to put the gun down, he shot himself in the head in front of them, police said in a statement released on Tuesday.

An investigation into why exactly the man would shoot Potinius has begun.

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The politician had been head of a healthcare centre in the town of Wetterau for the past seven years.

He associated with a number of clinics across the area – including a number of psychiatric centres, the Frankfurter Rundschau said.

READ MORE: Man beats ex-in-laws to death with hammer

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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.

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.

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