German court sentences killers of Ukrainian basketball players
3 December 2024 09:11
The Essen Land Court has announced the verdicts in the case of the murder of two young Ukrainian basketball players, Volodymyr Yermakov and Artem Kozachenko, which took place in February this year in the city of Oberhausen. Two of the accused teenagers were sentenced to ten years in a youth correctional facility, and two others were sentenced to eight and a half years, reports "Komersant Ukrainian" citing WDR.
The defendants were convicted of jointly committing a double murder. It was established that one of the convicts fatally wounded a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old athlete with a knife. At the same time, as the presiding judge stated, there was no motive for the crime – the criminals acted solely to demonstrate force. According to the court representative, the attackers were “looking for a conflict.”
Was the motive xenophobic?
The prosecutor’s office had previously suggested that the attack could have been related to the fact that the victims were from Ukraine, but the court did not establish a xenophobic motive. Two of the convicts are German citizens, and the other two are Syrian citizens.
In addition to the murder, the verdict included other crimes committed by the defendants. As it turned out, all of the attackers were previously known to the police for their violent actions, and some were even considered particularly dangerous. The prosecutor’s office demanded nine and a half to ten years in prison for each of them. However, the verdicts have not yet entered into force, and the convicts’ lawyers have announced their intention to appeal.
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How the events took place
The tragedy occurred after two young Ukrainians were on the same bus with the attackers. As the court found, the defendants, who were only 14 and 15 years old at the time of the crime, decided to “provoke a quarrel” during the trip. The basketball players did not give any reason for this.
After getting off the bus near the central station in Oberhausen, the attackers attacked the boys. The main perpetrator, a German citizen of Turkish origin, pulled out a knife and stabbed both victims in the stomach and chest. One of the basketball players died in the hospital the same day, the other ten days later.
Both Ukrainians came to Germany in 2023, fleeing the war. In Dusseldorf, they found friends and played in the youth basketball league for the ART Giants club. Volodymyr Yermakov was a member of the Ukrainian U-16 national team and played in the 2022 European Championships.
The parents of one of the victims, who had returned to live in Ukraine, and his girlfriend came to Essen to hear the verdict. They said that they would never be able to accept the death of their son, and that the verdicts, although fair, would not change anything.
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