A grisly find has been occupying the police in Hamburg since Sunday afternoon – it is not the first of its kind. According to the information, an angler first fished a lady’s slipper with bones in it from the Ernst-August Canal in the southern district of Wilhelmsburg, and then a bag discovered. “I was fishing, got stuck somewhere on the bottom and wanted to loosen the hanger. When I pulled it up, there was a bag on it. And something peeped out that resembled a bone,” the man told the “Hamburger Morgenpost”. He then notified the police.
The police moved out to the water with a number of patrol cars, criminal investigators and divers – and the officials found what they were looking for after hours: “Several parts of a person’s body were found in the course of the Ernst-August Canal,” said a spokesman for the Hamburg police on Monday . “Due to the situation in which it was found, it is assumed that the remains could have been lying there for a long time.” According to the “Hamburger Abendblatt”, some parts were wrapped in plastic.
It is not entirely clear who the body parts came from. Forensic medicine should now examine them and bring clarity. Local media consistently report that investigators suspect the person was not killed at the canal. The area around where the body parts were found is deserted, especially at night.
Department 41 of the Hamburg State Criminal Police Office, the murder commission, took over the case. The investigators now want to check, among other things, cases of missing persons – but by Monday noon there was still no new information: neither on the identity of the dead person nor on the cause of death or the circumstances of the alleged capital crime.
And officials are also checking whether there is a connection with a similar case from the summer of 2017. At that time, parts of a human corpse were also recovered from Hamburg waters over a period of weeks – as it later turned out, the sex worker Maria “Rosa” A. was the victim of a homicide. Despite extensive investigations, the perpetrator has not yet been caught. So far, however, there has been no indication that the two cases have anything to do with each other, according to the Hamburg police at the request of the DPA news agency.
The Hamburg police will take information from witnesses about the crime or the sinking of the body parts in the Ernst-August Canal by telephone on (040) 428656789.
Sources: Hamburg Police, “Hamburger Morgenpost”, “Hamburger Abendblatt”, DPA news agency
