Half a year after an attack on a regular bus, a 34-year-old has apologized: "I've hurt people, it was not right," he said in front of the Lübeck district court.
He is said to have set fire to the bus on July 20 on the way from Lübeck to Travemünde and injured twelve passengers indiscriminately with a knife, some of them seriously. A young man had to be operated on. (Read more about the case here).
The prosecution places the man among other things attempted murder in 48 cases, dangerous bodily injury as well as heavy and tried particularly heavy arson to the load.
"I saw him rummaging around in the backpack and then throwing him into the center of the articulated bus, and flames shot out of the backpack shortly afterwards," said a witness in court. In the backpack were two bottles of alcohol. Shots of surveillance cameras off the bus show passengers rushing in panic. The driver and several passengers finally overpowered the man.
"The accused saw himself as a victim of a conspiracy"
The 34-year-old could not be held responsible for the incident in the legal sense, "because he is currently not responsible for his mental illness," said a spokeswoman for the Lübeck prosecutor. The trial is about his introduction to psychiatry.
"The accused saw himself as a victim of a conspiracy and felt at least since April 2018 by unknown people by laser beams attacked," said prosecutor Ann-Sofie Portius. He wanted to end this conspiracy by setting fire to a bus and wanted to kill all inmates by the fire and knife cuts.
The man said he had been continuously shot at by unknown people with laser beams until his skin burned. To protect himself from this, he also wore a thick winter jacket and several goggles on top of each other in summer. He wanted to take revenge for the laser attacks. "I had such anger in me and wanted to give the attackers a lesson.
"Since I'm in psychiatry my skin is not burning anymore," he said. A psychiatric expert had come to the conclusion that the 34-year-old is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One month after the crime, the man had been transferred to a psychiatric hospital.