GERMAN HUMAN rights campaigners have welcomed a decision to retry a police officer in whose custody an asylum seeker burned to death.
Exactly five years ago yesterday, Ouri Jallow (23) from Sierra Leone was taken into custody in the eastern city of Dessau for allegedly disturbing the peace.
Police officers suspected the asylum seeker was drunk and locked him in a prison cell to sober him up, binding him hand and foot. Three hours later Jallow was dead, his body charred by a fire that had swept the cell in two minutes, reaching up to 800 degrees.
On trial two years later, the officer on duty at the time, identified only as Andreas S, admitted switching off the cell smoke alarm, believing it to be defective.
He also turned down the volume on an intercom link to the cell because, he said, he was bothered by the prisoner’s screams.
After two controversial years of testimony, during which police officers withdrew incriminating evidence against colleagues, a court in Dessau acquitted Andreas S.
It agreed with the defence version of events that Jallow, though drunk and bound, ripped through the inflammable mattress cover and set alight the foam filling with a cigarette lighter not found during a police search.
The Dessau judge said the police officer should have checked immediately on Jallow after hearing his screams and not continued his phone call.
However, the court acquitted him of manslaughter charges after ruling that not even his immediate intervention could have saved Jallow.
Germany’s appeals court threw out that verdict yesterday and ordered a retrial, complaining of “considerable gaps in evidence”.
“Could Jallow really have set fire to the mattress although his hands were fixed to the cell wall?” asked presiding judge Ingeborg Tepperwein. The retrial verdict was welcomed by German and international human rights groups.
“Whoever experienced the conglomeration of lies and cover-up that characterised the two-year Dessau trial will view today’s decision with relief,” said the Pro Asyl asylum seeker group.
Meanwhile, in Dessau yesterday where friends and family of the dead man held a candlelight vigil, Marco Steckel of the Dessau Victim Support organisation said: “This verdict is a slap in the face for the police who lied.”
The police officer’s lawyer, Attila Teuchtel, said he was “doubtful a new trial will lead to a different verdict”.