In room 701 of the Moabit Criminal Court, around 11 am, everyone present noticeably takes one’s breath. The 24-year-old defendant had just really said: “Killing is a good thing”. He said this during interrogation by the Berlin police with two officers and an interpreter. The recording will be played again on Tuesday on the big screen for visitors and trial participants. The accused confessed to stabbing a taxi driver in Berlin right at the beginning of the recording.
In the early morning of April 6 this year, Maundy Thursday shortly before Easter, the 49-year-old taxi driver was found seriously injured by a passer-by in Grunewald. He immediately administered first aid, but the taxi driver died in hospital that morning. The funeral service for the father of a 14-year-old son and a 22-year-old daughter in the Sehitlik Mosque in Berlin-Neukölln was attended by the family and many Berlin taxi drivers.
Even before the accused says the terrible sentence about killing, he tells of his flight from Tunisia in 2011. He was only 13 years old when he arrived in Italy with distant relatives on Lampedusa. He has not seen them since. He arrived in Belgium via France, where he lived until the beginning of the year.
In order to possibly explain the accused’s “extraordinary attitude” towards human life, the officers asked about the background of his escape as a seventh-grader and whether he had been a victim of violence in Tunisia. For both questions, the accused stated that the answers were too private.
Sitting silently in the glassed-in dock, the alleged perpetrator also watched himself testify in the video on Tuesday morning. His defence lawyer had said that her client did not want to testify for the time being. He had already confessed to the offences several times. Later in the recording, the accused reported that he had boarded the train in Liège. His actual destination would have been Denmark on the way to Oslo, Norway. Two days earlier, the accused had killed a woman in Belgium.
While changing trains on his way to Berlin, the accused said, he had already tried to find someone at a station between 4 and 5 a.m. on the morning of April 6. He had last eaten at 12 noon the previous day. “When I got off the train, I was hungry,” he says, “I wanted to take someone’s money, to kill him.” But he found no one on the streets, although “anyone” would do. He was too proud to ask for money or food on the train.
The interrogating officers insinuated in the video that the alleged perpetrator “gets a kick” from killing. After all, he had declared that he had stolen the new shoes he was wearing when he was arrested in Flensburg from a supermarket. Why didn’t he also steal bananas or other food at this shop instead of killing a man, an officer asks? The accused says: “If you want something, you have to kill.”
The taxi driver’s children and his sister are joint plaintiffs in the trial. One of their lawyers says during the trial: “What makes this crime so special is that it happened out of nowhere by absolute coincidence, so there are a lot of questions.” After reading out the indictment, the court gave the legal advice that the placement of the accused in a psychiatric hospital could also be considered.
The woman in Belgium and the Berlin taxi driver were murdered with the same knife. The accused says he had it ready in his jacket pocket when the taxi driver took him to Brahmstraße in the Grunewald district of Berlin. He had already picked out the place on the map on the train because of the large green area. The two had communicated in English. In the video he says, “I’m waiting for him to stop so I can kill him.” He then recounts the gruesome details of the murder.
He found his way into violence in Belgium, at least that is what he claims. There, the 24-year-old had been selling cocaine for a long time, to which he added: “This road is surrounded by murderers.” For him, it means that killing is “a good thing”. He had chosen this path until he died. When asked if he would continue to kill, he said, “Well, now I’m in prison, I think I’ll sit it out.”
Only towards the end of the video does he describe the moment when the taxi driver had left the car and he was alone in the car. He found only ten euros. Asked if he had been satisfied with that, he said, “It was enough to fill my belly and drive on.” With the money, he said, he bought chips and Capri Sun. The trial continues on September 5 and the verdict is scheduled for September 29.