Fury at payout for German child killer

A GERMAN court has awarded a man convicted of murdering an 11-year-old boy €3,000 (£2,600) in damages because a police officer threatened him during an interrogation.

Frankfurt state court ruled yesterday that 36-year-old Magnus Gaefgen deserved damages because his human rights had been violated.

Criticism of the ruling was swift and sharp, recalling the outrage provoked by the October 2002 crime itself.

Eleven-year-old Jakob von Metzler, son of a Frankfurt banking family, was missing for four days. It eventually turned out he had been kidnapped and murdered by Gaefgen, then a 27-year-old law student.

He confessed in 2003 to kidnapping Jacob in a bid to extort €1 million in ransom and impress his girlfriend. When the boy began to fight back and shout, Gaefgen said, he strangled him. He was convicted of kidnap and murder and jailed for life.

Reacting to yesterday's ruling, Veith Schiemann of the victims' group Weisser Ring said: "Despite the clear violation of his rights, payment of damages is not called for."

The German police union said, "The ruling overshadows the truly terrible crime - the murder of a child."

In the past seven years, Gaefgen has repeatedly gone to court in a dogged attempt to challenge his conviction and win compensation for the threat made during the interrogation by a deputy police chief, taking his case to the European level. In June 2010, the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights ruled that while the threat amounted to inhuman treatment, it was "not sufficiently cruel to amount to torture" and no retrial was necessary.

The Frankfurt officer, Wolfgang Dascher, who made the threat was convicted of inducing abuse of authority in 2004 and sentenced to a year's probation. He has since retired.

Judge Hasse cited earlier court findings that the officer had not respected Gaefgen's rights at the time he made the threat - which he did before it was known that the plaintiff had killed the boy - but maintained that did not excuse the threat.

"The right to respect of dignity cannot be removed from a criminal, even if he has broken the value system in such a severe and unbearable manner," Judge Hasse said.