The man who is scorned for having spilled acid in the face of the manager Bernhard Günther was extradited to Germany a week after his arrest. The Wuppertal public prosecutor’s office announced this to the German Press Agency on Thursday upon request. A judge at the Wuppertal district court announced the arrest warrant and sent him to pre-trial detention. The 41-year-old was arrested in Belgium on Tuesday last week. He is said to be one of the two men who ambushed Günther about 200 meters from his front door in March 2018 and burned it with highly concentrated acid. Günther had been brought to a special clinic with serious injuries and was at times in mortal danger.
More than three and a half years later, the crime could now be investigated. The investigators had compared a DNA sample of the 41-year-old with a DNA trace from the crime scene and scored a hit. The acid attack on the manager, then CFO of Innogy, which at that time still belonged to the RWE Group, caused an international stir. Innogy offered the perpetrators a reward of up to 100,000 euros.
Two more suspects in sight
The investigators now assume that the two men at the scene were a 34-year-old from Cologne and the 41-year-old from Belgium. But they are still investigating two other suspects. At least one of them could be the person who commissioned the act. But for tactical reasons, the police and the public prosecutor’s office are still keeping a low profile.
Günther is now CFO of the Finnish energy supplier Fortrum. He had suspected the mastermind behind the attack in his professional environment: he had a specific suspicion, but would not give a name. A few days after the attack, it became known that the RWE subsidiary Innogy was to be broken up and parts of its competitor Eon were to be taken over. The public prosecutor’s office is investigating serious bodily harm to Günther’s disadvantage. They face up to ten years imprisonment for this. “The aim of the attack was to disfigure it,” said a spokeswoman for the Wuppertal public prosecutor’s office.