The Moroccan man (34 years old) who first strangled and then burned his son (3 years old) in May has been sentenced to life imprisonment by the Siegen Regional Court.
The presiding judge Elfriede Dreisbach said on Friday ( December 18th) that it was a case of treacherous murder. However, the court had not been able to establish a special degree of guilt. The motive remained unclear.The man had confessed to having strangled the child in his sleep in Lennestadt in the Sauerland region in May, placed him on a mattress and then set it on fire. The court emphasised that the father had thought the boy was already dead when he set fire to the mattress.
The 34-year-old, who lived separately from the boy’s mother, had also not planned the crime. His son was visiting him. He was already unable to answer the question about the reasons for his crime in an earlier trial. Investigators found a suicide note in his flat. In it, the man wrote that he wanted to die next to his son.
The prosecution assumed in the trial that the three-year-old had still been alive when the man set the mattress on fire.
The verdict is final. An appeal was renounced.