Video footage shows fatal attack on wife in Zurich
Published: Wednesday, Jul 3rd 2024, 16:40
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A 51-year-old man is accused of killing his wife with numerous stab wounds in Zurich-Altstetten in November 2022. The prosecutor is demanding life imprisonment for murder, the defense lawyer seven years for manslaughter. The verdict will follow on Friday.
The background to the crime was jealousy, as became clear at the hearing before the Zurich District Court on Wednesday. A few months before the crime, the accused Swiss man with Turkish roots had become suspicious that his Moldovan wife was cheating on him with a neighbor. However, the investigation showed that there was no evidence of this.
He "had become pathologically obsessed with the obsession", from which he could no longer free himself, said the defense lawyer. He had increasingly wanted to prove that his reality was the truth and that everyone else was lying.
The act had not been planned. A prolonged negative development had led to this. When another argument broke out later that afternoon on November 23, his client lost control. He had acted spontaneously, without direct intent. This clearly constituted manslaughter. A seven-year prison sentence was appropriate, said the defense lawyer.
Fully culpable
The psychiatric expert determined that the defendant was fully culpable. He diagnosed the computer scientist with a narcissistic-compulsive personality accentuation. The execution of the crime had a "sadistic and harmful character".
The public prosecutor demanded a guilty verdict for murder and a sentence of life imprisonment. By committing the crime, the accused had wanted to assert his "absolute claim to power" over the 40-year-old woman and punish her for her alleged fraud.
Numerous cuts and stitches
The central piece of evidence in the proceedings is video footage from a camera that the accused himself had installed in the family home to monitor his wife. They show the crime as far as it was committed within the camera's field of vision. Noises and voices were also recorded from places that could not be seen.
According to the public prosecutor, the woman told her husband during the argument that she had had enough of him. This was followed by shrill screams. A fight broke out between the couple. The woman fought back violently and repeatedly tried to escape. He dragged her out of the camera's field of vision each time.
The entire sequence of events shows that the accused "did not initially want to kill his victim, but to torture her". He had inflicted numerous non-lethal stabs and cuts on her with an arming knife. It was only at the end, with cuts to the neck, that the killing was directly intentional. The woman bled to death in agony.
According to the public prosecutor, a "deliberate, well-considered action" was evident in the course of the crime. In the end, the man lay down next to his fatally injured victim and injured himself with the knife.
Children found dying mother
Immediately after the crime, the two children came home. According to the prosecutor, the dying mother can be heard on the video asking her son to call his aunt - her sister - on her cell phone and tell her to call the ambulance and police. The man had "stabbed" her and she was dying.
The children now live with relatives. Their legal representative and the representative of the sister and mother of the victim demanded compensation payments and damages totaling more than CHF 300,000.
When questioned in court, the accused gave information in a very quiet voice. He did not want to say anything about the actual crime. He followed the entire trial outwardly completely unmoved.
The court will announce the verdict on Friday.
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