A 63-year-old farmer has been given a suspended sentence for damaging other farmers’ equipment with nails, logs and metal parts hidden in fields. The district court of Neustadt an der Aisch decided on Thursday to imprisonment for 14 months for several cases of intentional damage to property, suspended on probation, as a court spokesman said.
In addition, he had to compensate the injured party for the damage in installments. In at least one case, it amounts to several tens of thousands of euros: an aluminum block dumped in a field severely damaged a corn chopper. Nobody was injured in the acts of sabotage in 2019.
The public prosecutor had pleaded for a prison sentence without parole. The verdict is not yet legally binding. The 63-year-old denied the crime. The police had found parts in his yard that matched the items deposited in the fields. DNA traces of the 68-year-old brother of the convict could be found on them. According to the spokesman, the judge firmly assumed that the two planned the crimes together. The now convicted 63-year-old was therefore the “head” behind the deeds – that he is the more dominant of the two, confirmed witnesses.
The background was apparently disputes over the leasing of fields. According to the spokesman, the judge also relied on the statement of a witness, according to which the 63-year-old had apologized to him because the two had hit the wrong person with an act of sabotage on him. The 68-year-old brother would also have been accused. However, he did not appear at the start of the trial last week, just as he did not show up last summer for the first attempt to hold the brothers accountable in the so-called “corn chopper trial”. The court wants to deal with him another time.