Thursday, October 22, 2020

My Dresden Story

 Around three weeks ago (the 4th of Oct)....two German tourists showed up in Dresden.  The two guys (both in mid-50s) were from North Rhineland Westphalia.  No one says much over their tour plan.  It might be that they intended to avoid out-of-country hassle/stress and just felt Dresden was a Covid-19-safe place to be in early October.

Somewhere in the walk around the 'Alt-City' (the heart of Dresden)....they encountered this one guy....with a knife.

Both visitors were stabbed in the back by this guy, with a kitchen knife.

One guy died later....the other survived.

So the cops were onto this....doing an investigation, based mostly off DNA left on the knife.  They found the guy in the past twenty-four hours (at least reported that way via ARD, public-TV, Channel One).

The accused?  Well....he's a 20-year old Syrian guy who came into the country five years ago.  Oddly enough, he was already on the Saxony 'watch-list' as a radical Muslim extremist.

He'd been released from a prison sentence the week prior (juvenile jail), and had fulfilled his sentence (by law).

What got him into juvenile jail?  Roughly three years ago (figure age 17)....he was noted for bodily harm on some folks, making threats, getting details/information on how to commit serious acts of violence against the state, and finally....he'd been busy trying to recruit folks for the ISIS war in Syria.  

On threat 'status'....you'd rate him as a '9' out of ten.  

The state of Saxony (odd they admit it at this point) says that he had actually become even more radicalized while in juvenile prison.....than he had been before.  To suggest this...means that they monitored the guy, his chats, his communications, and watched all of this take place in the juvenile prison...while doing mostly nothing.  You'd basically be admitting how stupid you were as a manager of a public safety program....but that's the layout of this story.

At this point, as of yesterday.....the state prosecutor has taken over the entire case.  Public attention focused on this?  Yes, in a massive way.  You see...after the 2019 state election, as the smoke cleared....the AfD Party (the anti-migration stance group) had taken around 27.5-percent of the vote.  It's possible that details of this murder will take a serious amount of attention against the government (run by the CDU Party) and anger people.

After he finished juvenile prison....the topic of deportation probably should have come up, and it should have been a simple pick-up at the prison gate....trip to a regional airport, and transport back to Syria.  But that didn't happen.  Preventative holding?  There's not a lot in German law to handle that unless you really demonstrated a serious mental issue and were identified as a threat....but the managers in the juvenile prison never did that.  You can ask dozens of questions over their handling but it doesn't correct the murder caused.  

I noticed over social media.....this odd question lingers out there.  This guy came by himself and some folks are asking the question....in 2015 when he arrived....was he really 15 years old?  It's an unanswerable question.  In fact, you really don't want to drag this out because it'd make a lot of people look pretty stupid in just accepting the guy's story....without real proof.

As for what happens now?  If I were the defense....I would just claim mental instability and a massive 'crazy-factor'.....thus getting a one-way ticket to a German mental facility.  The odds of this playing out?  I'd put it higher than 50-percent.  

Even if they just put him back in regular jail....for a murder episode, he'd just get a max of twenty years (meaning he's turned loose at age 40).  The odds that he'll be even more radicalized after twenty years?  Don't even ask that question.  

My last observation over this....having been to Dresden, and walked on Schlosstrasse....it's a major part of the city's tourism angle.  On a typical summer Saturday....there might be 20k people easily walking the street.  The city authorities would have to surge up the police patrols....to reassure people of the safety.  So a dozen more police on walking patrols....just because of this act?  Yeah.....one might imagine that for the next twelve months.....you'd have to put the manpower there, because of this one crazy nutcase.  

It'll be a hot story for about another 24 hours, then move to page six until the court case comes up (probably in nine months after a mental review of the guy).  It's possible that an evaluation comes to the conclusion that he was 5-star crazy when he arrived in 2015, and no one ever examined him as part of the process.  

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