A Hamburg court has freed a Portuguese restaurateur who shot a Turkish man burying his body under cement in the floor of his own restaurant.
The story behind Ercan D (CinCin)’s grisly end was every bit as unpleasant, explain news reports.
Portuguese businessman Alfredo S (or M, depending on which German newspaper one reads) had been threatened by his chef since 2014: if he didn’t pay up €1000-a-month in protection money, his business, wife and daughter would pay a heavy price.
Cincin was working for a local mafia which German authorities had “managed to identify”, explains Correio da Manhã today.
Thus Alfredo’s story of self-defence was accepted in a trial that saw him attacked by Ercan D’s family outside the court, and receive “various death threats”.
German prosecutors were calling for a three-and-a-half year sentence for Alfredo, due to the mitigating circumstances of coercion, but the court accepted the Portuguese man’s plea of self-defence and let him walk away a free man.
The court heard that in the final meeting between the two men in September 2015, Ercan D. had laid a loaded pistol between them, “in a threatening way”. A struggle ensued, in which Alfredo grabbed the gun, and shot the Turk in the head.
“Fearful”, Alfredo then dragged the body to a storeroom and “in the following hours buried the body in the restaurant, placing a layer of cement on top of it”.
German newspaper Bild described the case as “one of the most spectacular criminal cases in recent years” – stressing that the judge’s decision was tempered with the words that there was possibly a lot more to the story, and that the verdict hinged on the limit of self defence.
