Antonio H., at the age of 15, remained free. He did not have to be in custody like his older cronies. Ironically, he, the youngest, should have been the driving force, instigator, boss. Or a "powder keg," as a teacher called him.
With the freedom, it should soon be over soon. The juvenile chamber of the Essen Regional Court has sentenced Antonio H. to five years in prison. According to the guilty verdict, the minor was the most aggressive of a gang systematically organizing gang rape. Antonio H., along with his brother Gianni H., 19, with Nuri E., 20th, Dean Martin L., 19, and Enrico F, 24, were charged with rape, attempted rape, and coercion.
According to the court, the young men from Wuppertal, Essen and Gelsenkirchen founded WhatsApp groups, which they called "SpinnenGE" and "Scorpions MC 1%", in order to arrange for acts of violence: to attack women together, to commit them to sexual acts force her to rape her. The group called it "make Scorpion".
The court spoke of "horrible acts" and sentenced Gianni H. to six years and three months imprisonment, Nuri E. and Dean Martin L. to four years and Enrico F. to three years and nine months.
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Scorpions are "cool", Gianni H. had declared in the process of choosing the name. And they are "thin," as are the defendants. Thin, young men who developed a fateful group dynamic full of cruelty and empathy, in which each one of them must have developed the feeling of being the strongest, the greatest, the coolest. Or, as Gianni H. said, "Having five guys makes it easy to have power."
Since August 2016, one of them, for example, contacted WhatsApp or Instagram with a girl he knew and suggested an appointment. The girl was supposed to go somewhere, mostly in the dark, usually to a parking lot, supposedly from there to make a trip together: in a cafe or in a hookah bar.
But in the car the girl was picked up with, it was not just the one he had arranged to meet; there were more men, or they got on the way. They took their victims away from their victims and drove to remote locations. In woods or in a field. Places where no one could hear the screams, the cries for help from the girls.
21 trial days showed that the men knew they were acting against the will of the girls. After the deeds, they mocked and ridiculed their victims in the chats. One wrote, for example: "For me, the women come out of my car back the first need therapy."
"We will advise if we accept the verdict"
Public prosecutor Rebecca Henrich called this dismissal of the women as an offense tightening and demanded for Nuri E., who was the first to have the acts, a youth penalty of five and a half years and for Antonio H. seven years and nine months, because he had used additional violence against women , Henrich spoke in her plea of "perfidious behavior" of the defendants.
The judgments of the Chamber deviate from Henrich's demands. "We will discuss whether we accept the verdict," says senior prosecutor Anette Milk.
Excluded from the public, the victims of gang rape had testified. Three of them filed a complaint, alleging seven cases of rape. The investigators do not exclude that there were other cases, but the victims are silent out of shame.
Some defendants announced in the process to pay the girls compensation. Nuri E. promised, according to his defender Marc Piel two victims per 5000 euros. However, "the Board's legal considerations regarding the amount of the sentenced unitary youth sentence" regarding his client are "most scrutinized," Piel said.
The condemned are mostly Sinti, a grouping of the Roma minority. Their families are closely interwoven. One of them spoke in court of punishments that the Sinti community would impose independently of German justice.