Okba Michael B. has to go to prison for life. For the murder of 14-year-old schoolgirl Ece and the attempted murder of her 13-year-old friend in Illerkirchberg near Ulm last December. In its judgment of Tuesday, the Ulm Regional Court also sees the particular severity of the guilt of the convict. That means: B. may not be released early from prison after 15 years. Only if he no longer poses a danger to the general public can he apply for dismissal after 15 years. After how long he will be out of prison and whether that will be the case at all is not yet clear.
It is also unclear whether he will ever be free in Germany. Because foreign offenders convicted of murder in this country are always threatened with expulsion or deportation to their home country. Okba Michael B. came to Germany from East African Eritrea in 2015 – he does not have German citizenship.
“He basically serves the sentence here in Germany first,” said a representative of the public prosecutor’s office in Ulm at the end of the trial, according to the DPA news agency. For this to happen, the judgment must first become final. This is the case after a week at the earliest – if none of the parties involved in the process appeals against the judgment at the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) in Karlsruhe. The public prosecutor’s office and the joint prosecutor should be satisfied with the Ulm guilty verdict. The court followed their pleas and imposed the maximum penalty. Okba Michael B., on the other hand, would have nothing to lose before the BGH. His defense did not take the particular gravity of the guilt for granted.
If the BGH confirms the verdict, Okba Michael B. would remain in a German prison. And only then would the question of deportation to his home country arise. However, the Residence Act provides for the interests of the person concerned and the interests in an expulsion to be “weighed up, taking into account all the circumstances of the individual case”. There is no automatic separating mechanism for criminals.
In the case of Okba Michael B., there is in principle the possibility of deporting the convicted murderer to Eritrea and refraining from further enforcement of the sentence in Germany, the prosecutor continued. “But when that will be the case, after how many years, that remains to be seen.” However, there could be another hurdle: Planned deportations to Eritrea have repeatedly been the subject of court hearings in recent years and have sometimes been stopped. The reason is the difficult human rights situation in the East African country. Only in isolated cases were deportations there actually confirmed.
The star reported extensively on the process of the knife attack in Illerkirchberg:
Sources: Residence Act, DPA news agency
