German sandwich poisoning victim dies
January 9, 2020
A 26-year-old German man has died four years after a colleague poisoned his sandwiches and drinks at work, causing him to fall into a vegetative state, a judicial official in the German city of Bielefeld confirmed Thursday.
The man who poisoned him, known as Klaus O., was arrested in May 2018 after surveillance footage from the metal fitting company where he worked caught him lacing his coworkers' food and drink with a homemade powder that contained lead and cadmium.
The poisonings left two further colleagues at the company in the western town of Schloss Holke-Stukenbrock in North Rhine-Westphalia with severe kidney damage.
Another 21 premature deaths at the company were being investigated for ties to the poisoning, prosecutors have said.
No personal motives have been found for the crime. In court testimony last year, a psychologist who spoke with the perpetrator said that Klaus had wanted to experiment with how toxins affected his coworkers, similar to "a scientist who was testing substances on a guinea pig."
In March 2019, the district court in Bielefeld found the 57-year-old perpetrator guilty of attempted murder and issued a life sentence, an unusually tough sentence in Germany for attempted murder.
The defendant has appealed the sentence at Germany's highest criminal appeals court, the Federal Court of Justice.
kp/msh (AP, dpa)
Editor's note: Deutsche Welle follows the German press code, which stresses the importance of protecting the privacy of suspected criminals or victims and urges us to refrain from revealing full names in such cases.
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