BERLIN: A former officer for Communist East Germany’s Stasi secret police was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Monday for the fatal shooting of a Polish firefighter at a border crossing between East and West Berlin 50 years ago.
Martin Manfred N, 80, whose last name was not given because of privacy law, was convicted of murder over the March 1974 killing of Czeslaw Kukuczka, a 38-year-old Polish national, the Berlin court said in a statement.
The judgment can be appealed. The defendant, from the eastern city of Leipzig, did not speak during the trial, according to German media reports.
Kukuczka had tried to force officials at the Polish embassy in East Berlinto let him go to the West by telling them he was carrying an explosive device, which was actually a fake.
The city was divided at the time by the Berlin Wall.
Kukuczka was passing through the Friedrichstrasse border crossing known as the “Palace of Tears” when he was shot in the back from close range in broad daylight.
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Instead of being taken to a nearby hospital, Kukuczka was transported to a Stasi prison hospital further away because of terrorism suspicions, and he bled to death there.
His family was not informed of the true circumstances of his death and his urn was buried in Poland.
The court said that although the defendant acted on the orders of his superiors, his actions were not justified either under West German law or under laws applicable in East Germany at the time.
Key to the case was the reconstruction of a shredded document in 2016 that listed Stasi officers who received awards shortly after Kukuczka’s death for preventing what was described as a border provocation, Tagesspiegel newspaper said.
The defendant was awarded a medal for “neutralizing” Kukuczka a few weeks after the killing, the court said.
Martin Manfred N’s defence lawyer called for him to be acquitted, saying it could not be conclusively proved he was the shooter or that the killing qualified as murder instead of manslaughter, which would have been subject to a statute of limitations, Tagesspiegel reported.
At least 140 people were killed at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989. Few people have been held responsible for those deaths and generally face manslaughter charges, if any.