On Thursday after the Reformation a body was found in the building of the district court of Kiel. A security guard noticed that a toilet cubicle had been closed for days. Opening the door, the lifeless body of a 70-year-old man was found sitting.
Investigations revealed that the man was on 29 October as a witness in a criminal trial loaded. The assumption was close: The dead man sat undetected in the toilet for several days. Questions arose: how could it be that no one had taken notice of the body? Did the man even die a violent death?
"No, the man died a natural death," is now the answer of the prosecutor Kiel. In the autopsy of the corpse, no indication of a foreign influence was found, a spokesman said the SPIEGEL. "The man died of a heart attack." The spokesman confirmed the findings of the police doctor, who was the first to examine the body. The physician had also assumed a heart attack and had the corpse removed from a funeral home.
At the time of the death, the public prosecutor's office announces the 29th of October. The man died on the day he was supposed to testify. The trial was canceled after the accused had not appeared. According to the district court, all witnesses had been informed by telephone, but the 70-year-old was not reached.
But why did nobody discover the man? "It was a chain of unfortunate circumstances," says the Vice President of the District Court Kiel, Beate Flatow. In the field of public toilets it had come in recent weeks several times to water pipe breaks. In this context, the toilets were partially not accessible and temporarily locked.
The late man had closed the toilet door from the inside. Although a cleaning service always clean the toilets in the late afternoon. "However, a cleaner will never open a locked cabin door because she believes there is a visitor inside," says Flatow. However, when the same door was found to be closed again and again, the cleaning service had assumed that it had been closed again because of a water leak.
"This is not an everyday situation for us all," says Flatow. "We will do everything we can to prevent this from happening again." A first measure has already taken the district court: Since Monday controls a security guard from 22 clock all public areas of the building.