Mourtala Madou, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from Niger, stabbed his German ex-girlfriend, identified as Sandra P, and beheaded their one-year-old daughter, Miriam, at a Hamburg subway station.
In October 2017, a judge had revoked a restraining order that Sandra P had obtained against Madou two months earlier, on the grounds that he saw “no evidence” that she was being threatened. Madou’s threats then increased and he explicitly announced: “I’m going to kill our daughter, and then I kill you!”
A gospel singer at an evangelical church in Hamburg who happened to arrive at the underground station moments after the attack, filmed the scene on his phone. In the video the gospel singer Daniel J says, in English: “Oh my God. It’s unbelievable. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus. They cut off the head of the baby. Oh my God. Oh Jesus.”
Heinrich Kordewiner, a blogger from Hamburg then discovered the video on Daniel J’s Facebook page, and uploaded it to YouTube. A few days later, a team of state prosecutors and officers of the cybercrime unit of the Hamburg police knocked at Kordewiner’s door with a search warrant, and confiscated his computer, mobile phone and other electronics, allegedly to find “evidence” of the “crime”. He is currently accused of… uploading a video. Achse des Guten was the first media outlet to report the raid.
According to the search warrant, Kordewiner is accused of having “invaded the private sphere” of the murder victim, in breach of Article 201a of Germany’s Criminal Code. This bit of legislation passed in 2015. Among other things, it makes it illegal to take pictures that “display someone in a helpless situation”.
When the German parliament debated the law, one of the 10 experts invited to comment was Ulf Bornemann, head of the “Hate and Incitement” department of Hamburg’s public prosecution office. He praised the censorship law for sending “a clear political message that the administration is willing to act against hate crime in social networks”. Bornemann took part in the raid on Kordewiner’s apartment.
Mourtala Madou. Facbook
German daily newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt reported however that the footage was “blurred, taken from a distance and does not allow the identification of any person”.
Interestingly, the German publication Welt online posted a video that shows close-up footage of the victim. It was not taken down by authorities and neither was the the pubication’s office raided as it did not contain commentary on the beheading.
It has become evident that Hamburg’s government is still trying to conceal the beheading. In May, Alternative for Germany (AfD) MP’s filed a parliamentary enquiry about the police raid and details of the murder case.
Among other things, they wanted to know whether the child had been beheaded. The administration, in full breach of its constitutional duty, refused to answer. It also censored the questions by blacking out whole sentences. The newspaper Die Welt noted: “The text of an enquiry and the questions being blackened out without consultation, it almost never happens.”
Alexander Wolf, one of the AfD MPs who made the enquiry, told Gatestone Institute: “In the session of the interior committee, the Senator of the Interior and the responsible state prosecutor both replied very evasively to the repeated questions of our speaker, Dirk Nockemann, and imputed a lack of respect [for the murder victim]. In my opinion, this was designed to cause indignation against the enquirer on the part of the other MPs. Apparently, the Senator wants to sweep the issue under the rug.”
It is obvious that authorities in Germany can easily censor unwanted news and moreover punish bloggers who upload undesired information.
The state prosecutor even insists that this horrendous beheading – which was reported, among others, in France, India, Pakistan, South Africa and the United States – does not constitute such a “contemporary event”.
