Like Oury Jalloh and Mario Bichtemann, Hans-Jürgen Rose died after being arrested by the police in Saxony-Anhalt. The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office should start new investigations following new evidence.
After Hans-Jürgen Rose was released from the police station in the centre of Dessau on 7 December 1997 following an alcohol test and the withdrawal of his driving licence, the father of three children is said to have gone to a nearby block of flats and voluntarily or involuntarily fell out of the window. Rose is said to have died 28 hours later in the municipal hospital in Dessau as a result of the injuries he sustained.
26 years after the 36-year-old allegedly fell out of the window, a group called the Research Centre is casting doubt on this account by the Police and Public Prosecutor’s Office in Saxony-Anhalt. There are numerous inconsistencies in the case that suggest that the police officers on duty on the night shift had something to do with Rose’s death and that the man had been physically abused beforehand.
Together with Hans-Jürgen Rose’s widow and daughter, the Research Group therefore submitted a 40-page murder complaint to the Federal Public Prosecutor General on Thursday. The complainants reported on this at a press conference in Berlin on Thursday. Officers on the night shift had seriously injured Rose and dumped him in a puddle on the wall in front of the house in order to conceal their offence, they claimed.
The Rose case is the first of three deaths that caused a stir at the Dessau police station. In 2002, alcoholic Mario Bichtemann died after suffering a basilar skull fracture from an unexplained cause in drunk cell 5. The death of Oury Jalloh, who burnt to death in the same cell after a fire in 2005, is still making headlines across Germany.
To this day, the Initiative in Memory of Oury Jalloh is endeavouring to clear up the case and is currently taking it to the European Court of Human Rights. This initiative also gave rise to the Research Centre, which has been investigating Rose’s death for around two years and has also combed through the investigation files now published on the “Frag Den Staat” transparency platform. It emerged that there were overlapping personnel among the officers on duty in the 1997 and 2005 deaths.
At the press conference, the Research Centre presented further new evidence and statements, including the account of the forensic pathologist Uta Romanowski who performed the autopsy on the deceased. In a video recorded by the initiative, she said at the time that she had ruled out the possibility that the place where the body was found had been the scene of the crime. She also found parallel and stripe-shaped haemorrhages on Rose’s body, which could have been caused by batons. Presumably from such blows to Rose’s jaw, teeth had been pressed into her face and a lumbar vertebra had been shattered.
The Research Centre and Rose’s family also base their complaint on an expert opinion by British forensic accountant John Welch, who analysed the police station report of the day in question. According to the expert’s analysis, times were subsequently changed and facts rewritten in this so-called situation film using white ink and overwriting. These findings proved that the situation film had been manipulated, the complainants said on Thursday. According to a spokesperson, this was done with the intention of “misrepresenting the events of the evening in order to divert suspicion away from the police officers presumably involved”.
In fact, Rose had been taken to the police station a second time after his arrest for a drink-driving offence and a fender bender, as he allegedly wanted to get back into his car. This was also noted in the situation film – albeit with the times subsequently manipulated, as the handwriting expert Welch found out.
The times given in the situation film are not plausible: Rose is said to have been released at 3.01 a.m., but was already driving in his car at 3.02 a.m. – even though it was parked several hundred metres away. At 3.08 a.m., Rose was then stopped at the Mulde bridge – this location is four kilometres outside of Dessau.
A report was also written for this second drink-drive, which the research group suspects was fabricated: at 3.10 a.m., nine minutes after Rose’s first release. The second release from the police station took place at 3.35 am. At 5 a.m., Rose was found seriously injured by a neighbour in front of the house not far from the police station.
If the Federal Public Prosecutor General accepts the criminal charges, this would be the third investigation into the Rose case: it was closed in 2002, resumed in 2013 and then closed again a year later. The justice authorities were unable to find “any initial suspicion against a person involved”, according to the statement at the time.
But there was certainly suspicious behaviour. A police officer on the morning shift, for example, testified that he heard a colleague from the night shift say: “He wanted to punch me in the face, so I smacked him in the face.” According to the complainants, it is also possible that Rose was chained to a stone pillar in the police station’s dining room and abused.
In fact, in the early 1990s, people arrested at the police station were allegedly kept in the dining room because there was a lack of detention facilities. This was also confirmed by the police witness from the early shift. The police investigation file on Rose therefore contains pages and pages of photos from the dining room. The investigators labelled a folder of pictures of pillars in the building “Premises of Dessau police station where Rose was held”. DNA swabs were also taken from these pillars without result.
The Research Centre bases its assumption that Rose was chained to the pillars on abrasions on the outside of Rose’s shoes. The dining room had been renovated and painted with plaster lime before the incident. A white substance was found on the dead man’s T-shirt and was also visible on the uniform of a police officer. According to the press conference, this may have been the paint used during the renovation. However, these residues were not analysed in the death investigation.
It is to be hoped that the circumstances of Jürgen Rose’s death will be re-examined, that the Federal Public Prosecutor General will take over and lead the investigation after the charges have been filed and that clarification will be achieved, said Henriette Quade, spokesperson for domestic policy for the Left Party in Saxony-Anhalt. “Because murder is not time-barred.”
Published in German in „nd“.
Image: The re-enacted scene after the alleged window fall. There are considerable doubts about this police account (Dessau police/Frag den Staat).
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