A good week after the hostage-taking in the prison in Burg near Magdeburg, the Halle assassin was transferred to Bavaria. In the early morning, the 30-year-old was flown to Augsburg by helicopter, according to the Ministry of Justice in Magdeburg.
The transfer was carried out by an armed special unit from the Saxony-Anhalt correctional system and accompanied by special forces from the police of the state of Saxony-Anhalt and the Free State of Bavaria. It is unclear how long the Halle assassin will remain in the Augsburg-Gablingen prison.
The Bavarian Ministry of Justice announced that the transfer would bring many advantages for security. “Prisoners with potential for violence know neither the premises and organizational processes nor their fellow prisoners,” which makes planning for new crimes difficult, it said. The acceptance of prisoners is part of the trusting cross-state cooperation, Saxony-Anhalt will accommodate a Bavarian prisoner in return. According to the ministry, the JVA is the most modern prison in Bavaria.
Hostage-taking in the Burg correctional facility
On Monday evening of last week, the prisoner seized control of two officers one after the other in the Burg correctional facility and wanted to force his way to freedom. He forced the officials to give him access to the outside area in the middle of the prison walls. He was overpowered in less than an hour. The 30-year-old was injured. According to the Ministry of Justice, the employees were not injured on the outside, but were cared for. After such a serious incident, it is common to move a prisoner for security reasons.
The public prosecutor’s office in Naumburg is investigating the taking of hostages. She has to clarify how it could have happened. The assassin is said to have had an allegedly self-made object. With that he got the first servant under his power when he was supposed to be locked in his cell at night. Last week, the director of the JVA Burg described the object as a rolled sheet of paper that had been strengthened with a pencil and on which there was a piece of metal like a kind of hinge.
Attack on a synagogue in Halle in 2019
The racist and anti-Semitic assassin was sentenced to life imprisonment and subsequent preventive detention in December 2020. On October 9, 2019, Yom Kippur, the highest Jewish holiday, he tried to storm the synagogue in Halle and cause a massacre. When he failed, he murdered two people near the synagogue and injured others. Even then he had homemade weapons with him.
The Halle assassin is considered a difficult and uncooperative prisoner. On the Pentecost weekend of 2020, for example, he tried to escape from the Halle prison. During a yard walk, he climbed a 12-foot fence and spent five minutes unsupervised looking for a way out of prison before court officials caught him again. In prison in Burg he is said to have wedged the door to his cell with paper. According to insiders, the prisoner ties up a lot of the staff’s energy and thus also ensures that other prisoners’ usual procedures cannot always be followed.
