The explosion was so powerful that splinters of the shop window flew 30 meters further through the air: In August last year, employee Jela C. spilled gasoline in the pastry shop Lu e Lu in Pasing, set it on fire and triggered a violent explosion destroyed the store. This was the conclusion reached by the 12th Criminal Chamber at the Munich District Court I after six days of trial. The chamber sentenced the 55-year-old woman to six years’ imprisonment for arson in the act of causing an explosion. The motive must have been disputes between Jela C. and her boss.
Jela C. is a small woman with her blond hair tied in a bun. She was silent at the start of the negotiations, only let it be known through her defense attorney that the “content of the indictment was fully disputed” and that the police had investigated unilaterally. The 12th criminal division came to a different conclusion after the evidence was taken.
Jela C. had been employed as a saleswoman in the Italian confectionery on Landsberger Strasse since November 2017. As the police officer of the case told the court, there were problems between the employee and her boss. C. did not want to wear a protective mask, there were complaints about her and her unfriendliness on the internet and bad reviews. The boss then had a conversation with C., recorded it and presented it to the employee for signature. This was probably a warning. C. did not sign the protocol and instead disappeared into the summer vacation without greeting.
The shop closed for company holidays, and only the boss and Jela C. would have known that the video camera in the shop had failed. The police also found no signs of burglary in the shop. For this reason, too, prosecutor Charlotte Ruf assumed that Jela C. unlocked the shop with a key on August 15, 2020 shortly before 8 a.m., spilled gasoline in the counter area and set it on fire. The store was completely destroyed by the fire. There were 16 residents in the residential and commercial building at the time of the crime, one of whom was taken to a clinic with suspected smoke poisoning.
A little later, the police learned from a regular customer of the pastry shop who lived nearby and hurried to the scene of the crime that Jela C. was lying in a clinic with burns. C. told police that her injuries were from a fire that she set in her home garden to burn a cardboard box. When the flames came out, she was burned. The person in charge said the burns would not match the cardboard version. Rather, that the woman stood “in the middle of the fire”. The defense appealed against the judgment.