Dhe district court of Kaiserslautern sentenced Andreas S. to life imprisonment on Wednesday for double murder. The chamber considered it proven that the thirty-nine-year-old shot two police officers in the Kusel district at the end of January in order to cover up the poaching he had committed. The judges also determined the particular gravity of the guilt. This makes it almost impossible for Andreas S. to be released early after 15 years. His co-defendant Florian V. was found guilty of poaching, but remains unpunished.
The chamber followed the demands of the public prosecutor’s office. The accused, however, had presented the act differently from the beginning of the trial. He blamed his hunting assistant Florian V. for the shots at the 24-year-old police officer, saying that he himself had killed his 29-year-old colleague in a kind of self-defense. In their pleadings, his defense attorneys rated the act “at most as bodily harm resulting in death”, but did not demand a specific sentence.
The two officers were found dead in the Kusel district on January 31. The 29-year-old police officer had previously reported a traffic stop over the radio with a case of suspected poaching and shortly thereafter made an emergency call. The act had caused nationwide horror.
On the run, he shot his service magazine empty
As the presiding judge explained, S. and V. set out together on the night of January 31 to illegally poach. The two had done this regularly since autumn 2021. S. shot the game from the vehicle, V. carried the carcasses in the converted van. At the end of the hunting night, the two were on the K20 in the Kusel district and killed a wild boar. V. had just left the vehicle to get it when a civilian police vehicle approached and stopped at the van for a traffic check. S. handed over his papers and got out of the vehicle.
The policeman Alexander K. noticed the killed game through a rear door that had been modified by S. and was open a little. K. called for reinforcements over the radio, he spoke of “dubious people” and also expressed the suspicion of poaching. However, he did not name the personal details or the license plate number. S., who overheard the verdict and had neither a hunting license nor a gun license at the time of the crime, saw the only way to cover up the crime was to kill both officers. He grabbed the shotgun that was in the car and shot police officer Yasmin B. in the head “with intent to kill”. He then aimed with the intention of injuring K. and restricting his mobility. K. managed to make an emergency call, and while fleeing to the adjacent field he emptied his service magazine.
The presiding judge further outlined how S. now grabbed his hunting rifle, which was equipped with thermal targeting technology, and how K. lay with a shot in the stomach. He then shot K., who had collapsed in the meantime, more times, most recently at close range. Before fleeing, both V. and S. looked for the papers that had been handed out. S. noticed that B. was still alive, whereupon he shot the twenty-four-year-old again.
The chamber saw the version of the crime presented by S. refuted in several respects. For example, S. stated that he had not realized that he had been caught in a police check. In his reasoning, the presiding judge countered that S. had no reason to hand over his papers in this case. In addition, the photos showed that the police officers were clearly recognizable by their uniforms and equipment in the light of their flashlights and the headlights of the vehicles. They were also convinced that S. had not given his hunter his shotgun, as he had claimed. In the process it became clear that S. “always wanted to control everything”. He would not have given the drug user V., who had also consumed marijuana and amphetamines on the night of the hunt, a weapon.
Although S. only had to fear a comparatively small sentence from the police, the chamber is convinced that he wanted to cover up his crime – not only because of the impending sentence, but because otherwise he would also have been ostracized in hunter circles “and would have been robbed of his passion “.
