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Five shots, two dead: A 53-year-old is now being tried for this bloody act among cocaine dealers.
Shortly after 8 p.m., two men opened the door of Café 56 on Basel’s Erlenmattstrasse, entered and shot three people present. The perpetrators pulled the trigger five times and left again 20 seconds later. Two dead and one seriously injured remain.
This massacre in March 2017 made headlines as a reckoning among Albanian dealers. Both the 28- and 40-year-olds who were killed and the 24-year-old who was seriously injured had a criminal past in the drug world.
Legend:
The Basel city criminal court wants to deliver its verdict in the double murder trial on Thursday.
SRF/Roger Lange
One of the two shooters – both men with multiple previous convictions for drug offenses – didn’t get far: The now 48-year-old man was sentenced to life imprisonment and 15 years of expulsion from the country in 2018 for multiple murders as well as attempted murder and endangering life. The Federal Court later confirmed this sentence.
Gunman or accomplice?
The second person involved in the crime has been standing before the Basel city criminal court since Monday. The now 53-year-old escaped after the crime, but was put behind bars in the Netherlands for 44 months for cocaine trafficking. After that sentence he was transferred to Basel.
According to the indictment, the Basel public prosecutor’s office assumes that the 53-year-old fired the shots at the time. However, this is not entirely clear; the weapons remained missing. Accordingly, the process began with a large police presence. The accused’s handcuffs were not removed during the trial.
…extreme and appalling disregard for human life…
The prosecution accuses both those involved in the crime of having acted “with complicity and with direct intent” and in the spirit of a settlement. The 53-year-old went to an actual execution deliberately, “unscrupulously” and revealing “an extreme and frightening disregard for human life”.
The trial is scheduled to last four days. The five-member chamber of the criminal court wants to announce its verdict on Thursday.