Believing that her flatmate, who had forgotten her key, was standing in front of the door, a 25-year-old student opened her front door in Bonn’s old town at around 11 pm on March 15 this year. At that time, the young woman had no idea that she had let her future tormentor into the apartment building. After she saw that it was not her flatmate, she closed the door, but a short time later there was a knock on the door and she opened it again.
What happened later that night is now the subject of a rape trial before the 3rd Grand Criminal Chamber at the Bonn Regional Court. The defendant is Amal K. (editor’s note: name changed), a 36-year-old Pakistani who had last lived in Morsbach but is currently in pre-trial detention in Cologne. The public prosecutor’s office assumes that the refugee immediately forced the student into the flat after opening the door and covered her mouth. He allegedly posed as a member of the secret police who were looking for terrorists.
At first, nothing is said to have happened, but after about an hour, the man allegedly took off her jacket, tied her up with a bathrobe belt and then gagged her with a white T-shirt. Three rapes followed. The student’s six-hour ordeal did not end until 5 a.m., when the alleged perpetrator left the flat and his traumatised victim. At the time, the young woman suffered multiple injuries in her private parts and was in such a bad psychological condition that she had to be admitted to an LVR clinic two days later for several months.
Amal K. also has to answer for attempted burglary. Ten days before the alleged rape, he allegedly locked himself in the beverage shop at Rewe in Morsbach in order to rob the supermarket. When the police arrested him at around midnight, he was said to have hoarded together tobacco products worth about 13,000 euros (the exact value could no longer be reconstructed because a corresponding list from the police had disappeared, the judge said).
While the defendant admitted to breaking into the Rewe store, he said through his defence lawyer Martin Kretschmer that he had no recollection of March 15 in Bonn. “From the defence lawyer’s point of view, there is no doubt that something happened there. However, my client can neither remember driving to Bonn, nor can he remember what happened, nor how he got home afterwards,” said the lawyer. At the same time, he told the court that his client was now willing to undergo a psychological examination and to release the doctors from their duty of confidentiality.
Presiding Judge Claudia Gelber considered this a first positive step, but then spoke urgently to the accused. “A confession has a special mitigating effect in sexual offence proceedings,” she explained to him. According to the case file, the burden of proof was overwhelming. In addition to the DNA traces, his mobile phone had been located in a radio cell in Bonn, and Amal K., who had already served ten years in an Aachen prison from 2010 to 2020 for rape and robbery, had a relevant criminal record. In addition, there would be the victim’s enormous trauma. “Preventive detention is on the cards here. I just want to tell you, it might be worthwhile for you to think about whether there are any memories left after all.”
Subsequently, the court heard the 36-year-old’s legal carer. He handed over several expert reports to the court, according to which the accused suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and is also addicted to alcohol and cannabis. Already in prison, he had had auditory hallucinations and anxiety states. After he could no longer afford medication after his release, he had resorted to alcohol and weed. The man, whose toleration in the Federal Republic of Germany had recently been extended every three months, could not be deported because he did not have a passport. His guardian admitted to being in a dilemma: “For me it was a contradiction to look for his birth certificate, with which he would have been deported, but at the same time I was obliged to act in his best interests.”
Afterwards, a one-and-a-half-hour video of the police interrogation of the young student was shown in camera. The trial will continue next Friday with the questioning of the victim – here, too, the public will be excluded. The verdict is expected on October 11.