Mysterious crime
Acid attack on energy manager: Police arrest another suspect and hope for further evidence
Former Innogy manager Bernhard Günther followed the trial of one of the perpetrators who attacked him with sulfuric acid and seriously injured him in the courtroom of the Wuppertal district court last year
© Oliver Berg / DPA
Bernhard Günther is badly marked for his life. Two criminals attacked him with acid. A defendant is convicted. A second suspect has now been arrested. Günther and his lawyer hope that the backers will be exposed.
More than five years after the acid attack on the manager Bernhard Günther in Haan near Düsseldorf, a man who has long been the focus of investigators has been arrested again. An arrest warrant had been executed against the 36-year-old on suspicion of serious bodily harm, the police and public prosecutor’s office in Wuppertal announced on Wednesday. The man was arrested the night before without resistance in Dortmund.
On March 4, 2018, the manager Bernhard Günther was attacked by two men near his home in Haan after jogging on a footpath, showered with highly concentrated sulfuric acid and severely burned. He was able to drag himself home and wash some of the acid off his body with water. At times Günther was in mortal danger and had to be operated on several times. Eyelids and parts of the facial skin were transplanted.
Twelve years in prison for the acid attack
Last year, an accused Belgian was sentenced to twelve years in prison for intentionally causing serious bodily harm.
The 36-year-old suspect Serb had already been arrested in Cologne in 2019. However, according to the authorities, the urgent suspicion could not be substantiated at the time. Extensive investigations following the trial against the convicted perpetrator had led to an urgent suspicion. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the evaluation of seized evidence is ongoing.
Günther and his lawyer expressed the hope in a reaction on Wednesday that the client can now also be identified. “The middlemen and the client are still walking around freely. With the arrest of the alleged second perpetrator, we are taking a decisive step closer to them,” explained Günther through his spokesman.
Victims and lawyers suspect backers
Günther’s lawyer Martin Meinberg rated the arrest of the alleged second perpetrator as a “decisive success of the investigative authorities”, in which one had a part from the beginning. He hopes that this will pave the way to the middlemen and ultimately to the client. “From our point of view, the two perpetrators were not the initiators of the attack,” affirmed the victim’s lawyer.
At the time of the acid attack, Günther was CFO of the then RWE subsidiary Innogy. According to earlier statements, Günther suspected the client of the attack to be in his professional environment at the time. A few days after the robbery, it became known that Innogy was to be broken up and parts taken over by competitor Eon. In 2019, he made his public appearance for the first time again at a balance sheet press conference, clearly marked. Günther has been CFO of the Finnish utility Fortum since February 2021.