A picture of André Bamberski
Article from:
The Irish Times
Article date:
March 30, 2011
Author:
RUADHAN Mac CORMAIC
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Dieter Krombach
ALMOST THIRTY years after the mysterious death of 14-year-old Kalinka Bamberski, the trial began in Paris yesterday of a German doctor accused of raping and murdering her.
The French girl was found dead in her bed one morning in July 1982 while spending the summer with her mother and then-stepfather, Dieter Krombach, in Germany.
Mr Krombach, a Bavarian, has always denied all charges against him, but admitted to injecting Kalinka with an iron compound to help her tan more easily.
He was cleared by a German court of killing Kalinka at the house in Lindau, Bavaria, but was then tried in absentia in 1995 in France, where he was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years.
Germany decided against any extradition, however, meaning the GP remained free across the border. The French ruling was later thrown out by the European Court of Justice on the basis that Mr Krombach had not received a fair defence.
For 27 years, the victim's father, Andre Bamberski, waged a high- profile campaign to bring to justice the man he believes raped and killed his daughter, and fulfil what he says is a posthumous vow he made to her.
He hired private detectives and built a huge archive of documents related to the case.
In 1997 Mr Krombach pleaded guilty in a German court to sedating and sexually abusing a 16-year-old patient and was sentenced to two years in prison. He was banned from practising but, after his release, continued until he was jailed for 18 months in 2006 for operating without a medical licence.
But there seemed little prospect of him appearing in a French court in connection with Kalinka's death until a twist in the story 18 months ago.
In October 2009, Mr Krombach was abducted from his home in Bavaria, bound, gagged, driven across the border and dropped outside a courthouse in Mulhouse, eastern France. Andre Bamberski was arrested and charged over the kidnapping, but he denies being involved.
However, French investigators duly reopened the case against Mr Krombach. They spent more than a year re-examining the evidence and yesterday a new trial against the GP - now 75 - began in Paris.
On the first day of hearings, Mr Krombach's lawyers called for an adjournment and highlighted the illegal action that brought their client to France.
However, they failed in their attempts to stop the trial on the grounds of his kidnapping, with the French courts noting that the Nazi Klaus Barbie and Carlos the Jackal were tried in France after being kidnapped abroad.
"Dieter Krombach is not Klaus Barbie," Yves Levano, one of his lawyers, said yesterday.
Mr Bamberski, now 73, said he hoped for a fair trial.
German faces unusual French trial over slain girl
Article from:
AP Online
Article date:
March 29, 2011
Author:
JEFFREY SCHAEFFER
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Dieter Krombach
PARIS (AP) — A retired German doctor who was kidnapped and left in front of a French courthouse on the orders of a grieving father went on trial in Paris on Tuesday over the killing of a teenage girl 29 years ago.
The unusual trial is the culmination of a decades-long battle between two men, in two countries, now both in their 70s. But it also raises larger questions — about cross-border justice in the borderless European Union, and whether the father was right to try to take justice into his own hands.
Defense lawyers asked the judge Tuesday to suspend the proceedings and seek a European Court of Justice ruling on whether the trial is valid. A decision on that request was postponed until Wednesday.
Dieter Krombach lived in freedom for years in Germany after his stepdaughter, Kalinka Bamberski, a 15-year-old with wavy blond hair and a shy smile, was found dead in her bed in July 1982 in his home in Germany. The girl and her mother had moved in with Krombach after the girl's parents separated.
The girl's father, Andre Bamberski, believes that Krombach gave his daughter a dangerous injection to make her lose consciousness so he could rape her, leading to her death, Bamberski's lawyers say.
France convicted Krombach in absentia in 1995 of "intentional violence that led to unintentional death" and sentenced him to 15 years in prison. Germany did not extradite him or press charges, saying there was insufficient evidence. Krombach has denied wrongdoing.
In 1997, Krombach was convicted in a German court to a two-year suspended sentence and suspended from medical practice after pleading guilty to drugging and raping a 16-year-old girl in his office.
Then in 2009, Krombach was kidnapped from his German town, tied up, and appeared near the courthouse in the eastern French city of Mulhouse before dawn one morning in 2009.
Andre Bamberski later acknowledged involvement, and was hit with preliminary charges of kidnapping.
Bamberski said he had to act because the statute of limitations was running out and he wanted Krombach to face justice in France.
"Can we take vengeance ourselves?" defense lawyer Yves Levano asked the victim's father in the courtroom. "Dieter Krombach was attacked, beaten, attached to a fence in a state of hypothermia."
Bamberski's lawyer, Laurent de Caunes, told reporters Tuesday that the circumstances under which Krombach arrived in France "are irrelevant. The French judicial system now has him under their wing and it has to judge him."
Krombach's lawyers "are trying to explain that the court doesn't have the ability to try the case and that it should go to another jurisdiction in order to have it judged," De Caunes said. "This court can try the case. It should try the case," the lawyer said.
France's highest court, the Court of Cassation, has ruled that Krombach's detention in France is legal. Lawyers defending the right to try Krombach in France compared the case to that of Nazi Klaus Barbie, known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for his role in the Holocaust, and Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a Cold War-era mastermind of deadly bombings known as Carlos the Jackal. Both were convicted in France after having been kidnapped or detained abroad.
At Tuesday's trial, defense lawyer Levano insisted that his client "is not Klaus Barbie."
Bamberski made it his life's work to try to bring Krombach to court, hiring lawyers in France and Germany and rallying supporters through an association, Justice for Kalinka.
Krombach was badly beaten during his abduction, suffering head wounds, a broken rib and other injuries, his lawyers have said. Bamberski was handed preliminary charges for kidnapping and willfully causing injuries. That case is still under investigation by French authorities separately from the case of his daughter's death.
Another lawyer for the German doctor, Philippe Ohayon, said, "How is it possible inside a relationship of trust within the EU that from the other side of the Rhine, Mr. Krombach is innocent, and on this side we don't acknowledge German justice and he is accused? This is a situation that is absolutely unacceptable."
Krombach's daughter, Diana Gunther, said: "I hope that tonight this will be the end of this and that my father can come home."
The trial is expected to last through April 8. Other witnesses include German women who have told investigators that they were drugged and abused by Krombach in the 1980s.
After 27 years of waiting, father turns vigilante to avenge daughter
Article from:
The Sunday Herald
Article date:
March 28, 2010
Author:
FRANCE From Hugh Schofield in Paris
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Dieter Krombach
Andre Bamberski, a retired French accountant, spent 27 years of his life in fruitless pursuit of the German doctor who he believes raped and murdered his 14-year-old daughter. Five months ago, he decided to turn vigilante.
Abandoning faith in the official channels, this devout and quietly-spoken Roman Catholic resorted to kidnap. On the night of October 17, his target, Dieter Krombach, was abducted in Bavaria, driven across the border to France, and dumped - bound and gagged - before the courthouse in the eastern town of Mulhouse.
Today, Krombach, 74, languishes in the Fresnes prison outside Paris, and his trial for murder is set for later this year. Bamberski, 72, now faces criminal charges for kidnap. But, for the first time since Kalinka died in 1982, he says he feels at peace.
"At last I know that the purpose of my life will be fulfilled. Dieter Krombach will be judged for murder in a criminal court, and I will be there to see it happen," he said in a interview from his home in Toulouse.
Bamberski has just published an autobiography - Pour que justice te soit rendue (So that you see justice done) - in which he describes his extraordinary personal crusade. For many people in France, he has become something of a minor folk hero.
However, not everyone is convinced the tale is as straightforward as Bamberski puts it. In Germany, where prosecutors ruled long ago that Krombach had no case to answer, there is widespread anger both at the kidnapping and at France's decision to let a murder trial go ahead. And in Paris, a court is to rule on Tuesday on a bid to ban Bamberski's book on the grounds that it infringes the presumption of innocence.
"On 50 occasions in the book, my client is openly accused of murder. How is he supposed to get a fair hearing now?" asked Krombach's lawyer, Yves Levano.
The story begins in the German town of Lindau, where Kalinka was living after her mother Danielle had separated from Bambinski and set up with Krombach. On July 10, 1982, the teenager was found dead in her bed. Her stepfather said he had given her an injection of iron cobalt the previous night because she was anaemic.
The post-mortem failed to establish a cause of death. However, it did find signs of injury to her genitals as well as an unspecified white substance in her vagina. This was never followed up, but it convinced Bamberski that his daughter had been sedated and then raped. Krombach was questioned by German police, but in 1987 the case was closed for want of evidence.
Bamberski's subsequent campaign to have Krombach brought to justice was a long series of highs and lows. In 1995 a French court tried and convicted the German doctor in absentia, but eight years later that sentence was quashed by the European Court of Justice because Krombach had not been defended in the trial.
Bamberski became convinced that there were hidden interests at stake. He believed the German and French authorities were colluding to prevent an extradition, and that Krombach enjoyed high-level protection. He unsuccessfully sued French prosecutors for failing to take proper action.
His biggest breakthrough came in 1997, when a German court convicted Krombach of sexual assault on a teenage patient. He was struck off, and later convicted again for continuing to practise medicine. Bamberski took to haunting Krombach's home, forcing him repeatedly to change address, but his efforts seemed to be leading nowhere.
Last October, however, he received a telephone call from a Kosovar called Anton Krasnicqi, who offered to deliver Krombach to France. The man said he was acting out of sympathy and wanted no money. Bamberski consented, and a few days later he received a late- night phone call telling him that the doctor was in Mulhouse. Krasnicqi and another man also now face kidnap charges.
"Of course I would rather have avoided the abduction, but I was facing a complete dead-end. Here and in Germany the authorities were just hoping the case could be conveniently forgotten. I had to do something," Bamberski has said.
At the start of this month, a Paris court determined that Krombach can face trial, despite the conditions of his detention. The judges based their decision on other suspects who have been smuggled into France from abroad, such as the Nazi Klaus Barbie.
Krombach's lawyers, on the other hand, say there is the risk of a serious miscarriage of justice. "The way this affair has been covered in France is shocking," said Levano.
"My client was cleared of guilt in his own country. He was then kidnapped and taken illegally to another European country, where he is now going to be tried for murder. Only in France could that possibly be allowed to happen."
Doctor blamed for death abducted, beaten.
Article from:
UPI Energy Resources
Article date:
October 21, 2009
More results for:
Dieter Krombach
A French man is suspected of kidnapping and beating a German doctor he blames for the 1982 death of his daughter, French authorities say.
Police suspected Andre Bamberski, 72, of Toulouse, France, of taking justice into his own hands after German cardiologist Dieter Krombach, 74, was found tied up, gagged and beaten outside the criminal court building in Mulhouse, France, The Times of London reported Wednesday.
The newspaper said a French court in 1995 convicted Krombach in absentia of manslaughter in the death of Bamberski's daughter, Kalinka Baberski, 14, by injecting her with a toxic substance while she visited her mother in Lindau, Germany. The girl's mother was reportedly living with Krombach at the time and Bamberski has alleged the doctor drugged the girl with the intent of raping her.
German officials, however, refused to extradite Krombach. The Times said French investigators were trying to determine whether Baberski carried out the kidnapping or if supporters were responsible.
Robert Pince, the head of a pressure group established by Bamberski, told the newspaper he believes Bamberski tried to deliver the cardiologist to the courts.
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