IIn the case of the 17-year-old Ukrainian youth basketball player Volodymyr Yermakov, who was stabbed to death in Oberhausen on Saturday, the responsible Essen murder commission does not see “concrete evidence of a xenophobic act”. Extensive witness interviews and an evaluation of the evidence have shown that Mert V, the 15-year-old alleged German-Turkish mastermind, “now points to a spontaneous escalation of violence.”
One Ukrainian, a 14-year-old student from Syria and a 13-year-old Lebanese girl were also seriously injured in the attack. Investigators rejected Ukrainian media reports that “their compatriots were attacked only because they are Ukrainians.”
According to the murder team's findings so far, a verbal quarrel broke out on the bus between a German-Turkish and a German-Greek on the one hand, and Ukrainians on the other. According to “Bild” newspaper, after getting off at the main train station, Mert V. deliberately sought a confrontation with two older, bigger and more athletic Ukrainians and without hesitation stabbed the two Ukrainians alone. nine times with a knife.
When a Syrian student and a German-Lebanese woman wanted to come to the aid of two Ukrainians, they were also stabbed by V., who was known to the police as an intense offender. “He probably didn't care if anyone was killed,” the newspaper quoted the investigator as saying. “And there was no sign of remorse at the time of the arrest.”