Because, according to the indictment, he was alleged to have ambushed two men in an apartment in the city of Salzburg in December 2018 with an unknown accomplice, masked and armed with pistols and a jackknife, a Romanian (39) sat on Thursday in a known trial before a jury’s senate . The robbers finally fled without prey – one perpetrator fixed the apartment owner on the ground, but his friend fought heavily against the second perpetrator. According to the indictment, the friend was injured with the said knife – it was left at the scene.

Since the investigators found DNA traces on the knife that can clearly be attributed to the 39-year-old Romanian, he was written out for arrest, finally caught in Italy and extradited. During the trial, the Romanian (defender: RA Franz Essl) protested his innocence: “I was not in Salzburg on the day of the act, but with my birth mother in Upper Austria.” The Romanian’s father and stepmother have lived very close to the crime scene for a long time – there were many objects belonging to his clients in their apartment, such as dishes and fishing equipment with several knives. Towards the end of 2018, the stepmother put all this down next to a garbage can for disposal – many people had access to the things.

The Senate (chair: Judge Anna-Sophia Geisselhofer) finally acquitted the Romanians on Thursday in case of doubt (legally binding). Analogous reasons for the judgment: It was not possible to prove whether the seized knife with the Romanian’s DNA was a murder weapon or whether it was precisely this knife that was used in the commission of the crime. One victim suspected that a butterfly knife was a murder weapon.