Justice
Drach trial: Prosecution calls for long imprisonment
In the trial against Thomas Drach, the public prosecutor’s office is demanding 15 years in prison and preventive detention. photo
© Federico Gambarini/dpa
For almost 23 months, the Cologne Regional Court has been investigating the question of whether Reemtsma kidnapper Thomas Drach should be behind bars again – possibly forever. Now the process is entering the home stretch.
The public prosecutor’s office assumed that the 63-year-old was guilty of aggravated robbery and attempted murder. On the 99th day of the trial, she viewed it as “proven beyond a doubt” that Drach had robbed three cash-in-transit vehicles in 2018 and 2019 in front of Ikea stores in Cologne and Frankfurt am Main and at Cologne/Bonn Airport. Drach also shot at money messengers in two incidents and seriously injured them. Because he acted out of greed, it should be considered attempted murder, said the prosecutor. In total, the 63-year-old stole almost 142,000 euros in the three crimes.
Ultimately, it should be noted that “the evidence points like an arrow to the defendant Drach,” it said in the plea. The prosecutor referred, among other things, to a DNA trace from Drach on a license plate holder of a getaway vehicle, to connections between the 63-year-old and certain vehicles in connection with the crimes, and to the statement of a former fellow prisoner. During the trial, he stated that Drach had admitted three of the four robberies to him while in custody. The prosecutor described the witness as “absolutely credible”. In conjunction with the evaluation of video recordings from surveillance cameras at the crime scenes, a well-rounded overall picture emerges, according to the prosecutor.
However, the prosecution was unable to provide any proof of the crime for a robbery of a valuables transport in Limburg, Hesse, which Drach was also accused of. She requested acquittal for this crime.
Application for preventive detention
In addition to the prison sentence, the public prosecutor also requested preventive detention for the German. After serving his prison sentence, Drach would be transferred to the penal system. There he would continue to sit behind bars. Against the background of Drach’s numerous previous convictions – including the kidnapping of the heir to the Hamburg tobacco dynasty, Jan Philipp Reemtsma, in 1996 – the public prosecutor said: “From an early age, crime has been his only strategy for making money and a life of luxury respectively.”
Drach’s defense attorneys, however, pleaded for acquittal. “Mr. Drach may be a suspect in the prosecution,” said a defense attorney. But that is not enough for a conviction. Drach was not recognized at any of the crime scenes or identified by witnesses. “Nobody said: There he is, Thomas, the Reemtsma kidnapper,” said the defense attorney. The defense attorney accused Drach’s former inmate in custody, cited by the public prosecutor, of lying. The man accused Drach in order to get a lenient sentence in his own trial at another regional court. “The defendant has objectively not been convicted here,” the lawyer continued.