D13 years after the accident in March 2009, the prison investigation into the omissions in the collapsed Cologne Metropolis Archive continues. The second prison senate at the Federal Courtroom of Justice (BGH) reversed an earlier judgment by the Cologne Regional Courtroom in opposition to a former “development supervisor” of the Cologne Transport Authority (KVB) for negligent murder and referred the case again to a prison chamber of the Cologne Regional Courtroom for an additional listening to.
This emerges from a decision by the prison senate from October 2021, which the BGH revealed on Monday (Az.: 2 StR 418/19). The similar BGH Senate had already overturned a number of acquittals in the previous 12 months.
In the particular case, the accused was sentenced to eight months in jail in 2018 by a prison division of the Cologne Regional Courtroom for 2 counts of negligent murder; the enforcement was suspended on probation. At the time, the judges noticed it as confirmed that the chief development supervisor, who was commissioned by the KVB to monitor the measures in the excavation pit at Cologne’s Waidmarkt, had solely “insufficiently” fulfilled his duties. The man efficiently defended himself in opposition to the judgment of the first occasion with a procedural grievance.
judges as witnesses
As a result of: Following the oral pronouncement, the judges had been heard as witnesses to the occasions surrounding the metropolis archives in one other prison case earlier than the Cologne Regional Courtroom. According to the BGH decision, they had been excluded from the additional train of the judicial workplace in the current case from this cut-off date by legislation. You shouldn’t have issued a written judgment afterwards both.
The accident occurred on March 3, 2009 throughout development work on Cologne’s north-south city railway. As a result of development staff left a big block of stone in the excavation just a few years earlier, a number of broken spots may develop in an underground concrete wall. Gravel and water seeped by way of these into the excavation pit at Waidmarkt. The Cologne metropolis archive and two residential buildings collapsed, two males died.
