“In the end everyone was lucky. You too, Mr. K.,” says the presiding judge, Nikolaus Lantz. Ali K. is the man who tried to hijack a car in Laim in May of last year in order to drive “Christian people” to death in the Munich pedestrian zone. The attorney general took over the case, but at the end of the trial everyone agreed that 26-year-old K. had not acted out of Islamist motives. Rather, K. suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. That is why the tenth criminal chamber at the Munich I Regional Court decided that the native Iranian should be permanently placed in a psychiatric clinic.
“Of course it was a shock,” said a witness in court, “what can happen when he gets into the car!” It was on the evening of May 10, 2020. Leopold P. was standing with his car at a red traffic light on Zschokkestrasse when Ali K. broke away from the crowd of pedestrians at the traffic light and drove to his car. He hacked the driver’s door with a 12-inch kitchen knife and tried to open it. But the automatic locking prevented that. Then K. went screaming loudly and raging at three other cars.
Ali K. later told a police officer that he really wanted a big Audi with a lot of horsepower, in order to kill as many people as possible in the pedestrian zone between Marienplatz and Stachus. Matthias F. drove after the perpetrator after the unsuccessful attacks, even followed the man from the bollards on Lautensackstrasse on foot until a civil patrol accidentally became aware of him. “Stand still or I’ll shoot,” one of the policemen shouted. Thereupon K. allowed himself to be arrested without resistance.
According to his defense attorney Ruth Beer, Ali K. suffers from the delusion that the Italian mafia killed his family and kidnapped his sister. Since there are many Christians in the Mafia, he wanted to take revenge on them. When a police officer asked during the interrogation whether he had anything to do with the Islamic State, K. simply said “yes”. The psychiatric expert Matthias Hollweg had interpreted this approval as a “flight of thought”, as judge Lantz explained. In a state of paranoid schizophrenia, Ali K. simply accepted the new thought offered. “But we don’t believe in Islamist motives,” said Lantz. The public prosecutor’s office and the state security officers present at the trial also came to the same conclusion.
Ali K. is an Afghan citizen, he came to Germany in 2011 and, according to the court, built a “respectable life” for himself. He worked as a painter, most recently as a driver, when and why the illness came over him cannot be said. Nikolaus Lantz said in the judgment that he was “lonely and overwhelmed”. Hardly any contacts were found on the cell phone and when acquaintances met him in the spring of last year, they were shocked by his condition. Ali K. then went to a clinic, but left it six days before the crime at his own request and without knowing the illness. In a clinic, K. could now stabilize himself and at some point lead a normal life, said Lantz and said to K: “I don’t believe in deporting you to Afghanistan untreated. You are not an Islamist. But I don’t have to decide.”