[update] Aachen: 1/12 update and announcement of date of the verdict

Today, 1/12 was the final day of trial for the presentation of the evidence for or against the comrade from Amsterdam accused by the prosecution of Aachen of a bank robbery that took place in July 2013 in the same city.

This means that on the next court date (5/12) both the defense and the prosecution will argument their pleas, marking the conclusion of this court case. Today the judge said that the verdict could already be on Monday 5th December, but he spoke about the possibility that the two judges and the two jurors could also take more time to deliberate and pronounce the verdict on Thursday 8th. Both court dates are scheduled to begin at 9:30, thus, for anyone wanting to be present, remember that the lines and extra controls could take up to 45 minutes to get through. (Be there latest at 8:45!!)

Since the last update an other carousel of experts and police officers have proudly fulfilled their dutiful collaboration to this repulsive judicial circus.

On monday the 28th too early in the morning, we had the pleasure of having to listen to a keen cop which has been on the case since the beginning, picking the comrade up in Bulgaria in July 2015, and attending most of the visits she had in prison. During the investigation this cop interviewed prison guards asking them if in fact the comrade spoke german. They responded affirmatively, but clearly stating that there was a very distinct dutch accent and with frequent grammatical mistakes.  Trying to pass herself off as a language expert, the cop blatantly proposed that our comrade was in fact acting out a role in which she was pretending all along that she could not speak perfect german. If the cop’s statement were true, it would fit with the declaration of one of the two bank employees, who said that the woman in disguise spoke good german.

After this came the DNA expert, who could only in fact state that he is sure that the DNA was of the comrade, but could in no way determine when, how or why this trace appeared on the pistols.

During the afternoon on the same day the judge took into consideration and read out loud a letter that the prosecution presents as the words of the comrade. This letter “With midnight in one’s heart”, first appeared on Avalanche, anarchist correspondence in December 2015. This letter was published anonymously.

The prosecution presented an other document sent them by their friends in catalunia, the Mossos d’esquadra  talking about their anti-terrorist investigation against anarchists of Barcelona linked to the GAC (gruppos anarchistas coordinados). The main point of this document, was the insinuation that the mossos needed to find a way of explaining how their constructed terrorist organization had financed themselves. An eager attempt to build a motive, to which even the judge commented with “we cannot verify any of this”.

On thursday 1st December the court gave (a lot of) time to a professor of an institute for biological forensics. This professor of control and creepiness appears in court about 110 times a year to give her valuable opinion on the likelihood of a given cctv image being compatible and comparable with the features of a suspected individual. This professor of perversion of life, after turning a human body into a biometrical algorithm, then proceeds, through a mathematical calculation, to classify on a scale of 0 to 4 the likelihood of the match. However, in this case, given the poor image quality of the cctv and the good disguise of the early morning customer, she could not say much. So after scrutinizing the small sections of the body which were more or less visible through the footage,  she came to the invaluable expert conclusion that there are no distinctive similarities between the images of the cctv in the bank and the comrade.

In the afternoon, the court went over some insignificant bank transactions which took place during the summer of 2013.

On an other note, it was pleasing for us to see that the court house was already busy with some christmas decorations. Over the past weeks, some little elfs of the night have decorated with some lovely green and red paint bombs the facade of the building…

solidarity and rage