Sixteen years in prison for the murder of her husband, a well-known Interlaken restaurateur killed with a baseball bat in 2020: this is the sentence imposed by the Bernese Oberland Regional Court on a former professional boxer of Brazilian origin. KEYSTONE/PETER SCHNEIDER sda-ats
This content was published on December 09, 2022 – 16:06
(Keystone-ATS)
Sixteen years in prison for the murder of her husband, a well-known Interlaken restaurateur killed with a baseball bat in 2020: this is the sentence imposed by the Bernese Oberland Regional Court on a former professional boxer of Brazilian origin.
The prosecution had sought an 18-and-a-half-year sentence for murder or possibly intentional homicide; the defense was acquitted for an incomplete preliminary investigation, in which from the outset the focus was on the hypothesis of the young wife’s guilt.
In addition to the prison sentence, the court of the trial that opened on Monday in Thun also decreed the expulsion from the country for 12 years for the woman, currently 36 years old. The sentence can be appealed to the higher instance. The accused remains in prison.
The bloody incident happened in the autumn of 2020. The body of the 61-year-old Swiss was found on the evening of October 18, 2020, in a building in the center of Interlaken: it showed signs of great violence perpetrated with a blunt object. The woman was then arrested a few weeks later, on November 9, and has since been placed in preventive detention. The young woman, passionate about martial arts, had won the title of world champion of the largest boxing federation in the world, the World Boxing Association, in 2018. She also ran a boxing gym in Interlaken.
In today’s ruling, the court found all the evidence presented by the prosecution valid, which presented a clear mosaic, said Jürg Santschi, president of the court. There is no doubt that the 36-year-old Brazilian-born killed her husband, almost 30 years her senior, with a baseball bat in October 2020.
The defense attorney instead believed that the investigation had not been well conducted and fixed from the beginning on the hypothesis that it was the young wife who had beaten her husband to death. In his opinion the police would not have seriously investigated the traces that indicated the possible presence of third parties. Furthermore, the lawyer considered that all those questioned who made negative comments about the Brazilian could have grounds for retaliation. Among other things, they are former suitors whom she had rejected. According to the defendant, the woman was also suffering from severe pain in her shoulder and she would not have been able to hit with a baseball bat like that.
