Berlin police probe 'execution-style' killing in park
August 25, 2019
Police in Berlin ramped up investigations on Sunday into the death of a 40-year-old man from Georgia who was shot in broad daylight at a park in the German capital.
The deadly shooting occurred around noon on Friday at the Kleiner Tiergarten park in the Berlin neighborhood of Moabit.
An eyewitness told the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper that the attack looked like an "execution-style" killing.
A suspect approached the victim from behind, shooting him twice in the head before fleeing on his bicycle, the witness said.
Police divers later recovered a handgun and the bicycle from the nearby Spree River, according to news agency dpa.
Shortly after the incident, police arrested a 49-year-old suspect from Russia in connection with the attack. Berlin prosecutors said that an arrest warrant was issued against the man on charges of "insidious murder" and that he is in pretrial detention.
Read more: Berlin's Sonnenallee: Is Germany's best-known crime scene all that bad?
Questions about victim's background
Authorities have not released many details about the backgrounds of either the victim or the suspect in the case and have not commented on a possible motive for the attack.
German media reported that the victim was a veteran of the Second Chechen War, which took place from 1999– 2009, who later joined an anti-terrorist unit in Georgia.
According to information from public broadcaster WDR, German security agencies had listed the 40-year-old victim as a potential militant Islamist, but he was later removed from the list last year after authorities determined he did not pose an acute threat.
The man was reportedly an asylum-seeker who was slated for deportation but had appealed the decision, saying there had been multiple attempts on his life — most recently in Georgia in May 2015.
rs/tj (AFP, dpa)