A person who killed six other folks by way of riding his vehicle right into a crowd of pedestrians in a German town in 2020 has been sentenced to existence in jail.
The regional courtroom at Trier within the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate sentenced Bernd Weimann, 52, to existence imprisonment and a duty to go through psychiatric remedy.
Weimann drove his SUV at top pace into a delegated pedestrian zone on December 1, 2020, indiscriminately concentrated on passers-by.
He killed 5 other folks, together with a toddler, and injured many others. A 6th sufferer died nearly a 12 months after the assault.
During the year-long trial, prosecutors argued that the defendant deliberate the assault with the goal of “killing or injuring as many people as possible”.
At the time of the assault, investigators mentioned he was once inebriated and had pushed his vehicle in a “zig-zag” trend into the gang.
Any political, terrorist or spiritual cause was once dominated out on the time, and none was once established right through the trial.
According to the prosecution, the motive force was once annoyed by way of his non-public scenario. Before the assault, he had no mounted deal with and lived in his vehicle, growing a “general hatred of humanity”.
The defendant was once best in a position to offer an approximate and occasionally contradictory account of the occasions. An knowledgeable opinion ready prior to the trial decided that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.
In fresh years, Germany has suffered a number of assaults by way of mentally disturbed drivers ramming their vehicles into crowds.
One of probably the most severe was once performed in April 2018 within the western town of Münster. A person drove a minivan into a gaggle of other folks amassed out of doors a cafe, killing 5 of them prior to taking pictures himself.
In December 2016, 12 other folks had been killed when a person drove a lorry right into a Christmas marketplace in Berlin, within the deadliest Islamist assault to be perpetrated on German soil.
