The Cologne City Archives process must be reopened
Die the criminal investigation into the omissions in the collapsed Cologne City Archive continues 13 years after the accident in March 2009. The second criminal senate at the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) reversed an earlier judgment by the Cologne Regional Court against a finding by a “construction supervisor” of the Cologne Transport Authority (KVB) for negligent homicide and referred the case back to a criminal chamber of the Cologne Regional Court for another trial.
This emerges from a decision by the criminal senate from October 2021, which the BGH published on Monday (Az.: 2 StR 418/19). In the past year, the same BGH Senate had overturned several acquittals.
In the specific case, the accused was sentenced to eight months in prison in 2018 by a criminal division of the Cologne Regional Court for two counts of negligent homicide; the enforcement was suspended on probation. At the time, the judges saw it as proven that the chief site manager, who was commissioned by the KVB to monitor the measures in the excavation pit at Cologne’s Waidmarkt, had only “insufficiently” fulfilled his duties. The man successfully defended himself against the judgment of the first instance with a procedural complaint.
judges as witnesses
Because: Following the oral pronouncement, the judges were heard as witnesses to the events surrounding the city archives in another criminal case before the Cologne Regional Court. According to the BGH decision, they were excluded from this point in time by law because of the exercise of further judicial office in the present case. You should not have issued a written judgment afterwards either.
The accident happened on March 3, 2009 during construction work on Cologne’s north-south urban railway. Because construction workers left a block of stone in the large excavation pit a few years earlier, several damaged spots could form in an underground concrete wall. Gravel and water seeped through these in the excavation pit at Waidmarkt. The Cologne city archive and two residential buildings collapsed, two men died.