Dresden, Germany - A German prosecutor demanded Monday that judges sentence a self-avowed racist to life in prison without automatic parole for stabbing a pregnant Egyptian pharmacist to death. In his summation, senior prosecutor Frank Heinrich said Alex W, aged 28, had coldbloodedly planned in advance to kill headscarf-clad Marwa al-Shirbini in a German courtroom this year "out of sheer hatred for non-Europeans and Muslims."
"His guilt is especially great," the prosecutor told the court, which is scheduled to hand down its verdict this week.
"In the sight on her 3-year-old son, he butchered this mother as if he were a hired assassin," said Heinrich, who said that the attempt to kill her husband, who tried to rescue her, was also intentional. The husband was gravely wounded, but survived.
Germany has no death penalty, but the prosecutor said W should receive the highest penalty, life in jail, which is reserved for attacks of a heinous nature and those on unsuspecting victims.
Heinrich called for the court to rule that both these features applied in this case.
Life prisoners in Germany commonly win parole after 15 years, but such a ruling would delay parole consideration for an extra 3 to 10 years and function as a recommendation to keep W in prison till he dies.
The case triggered outrage in Egypt, amid perceptions that W was killed because she regularly wore an Islamic headscarf.
W is charged with the murder of al-Shirbini, the attempted murder of her scientist husband who was in Germany to pursue research, and causing dangerous bodily harm in the melee in Dresden on July 1 before police could restrain him.
"He went at them both with all his might, determined and focussed," said the prosecutor. "He killed a human being and wounded another so seriously that it was only a matter of luck that the man survived.
"He ignored commands to stop from the judge and from his own lawyer. He kept mercilessly stabbing her as she lay on the ground."
The prosecutor stressed that W was legally sane in the opinion of a court-appointed psychologist.
"He deliberately wrecked a family. He did not have the least concern for the child's future, which is additional proof of his lack of humanity, his lack of feelings," said the prosecutor. "What a contrast to his self-pity."
Heinrich said W had continued to speak insultingly about al-Shirbini to the psychologist long after the killing.
"That leaves me almost speechless," said Heinrich.
W, who admitted last week that he hated non-Germans and Muslims in general, was born and raised in Russia.
The stabbing happened at an appeal hearing, just after al-Shirbini had just testified about racist slurs he had uttered against her in 2008 at a playground. On July 1, prosecutors were seeking a harsher sentence against him but there was no special security in the court.
Prosecutor Heinrich said a statement from W, read aloud last week in court, had not even been an admission of guilt, but aired anew W's belief that he had been treated unfairly by the court in the criminal-insult case and had been in a "funny mood."
In the statement, W had only said he was sorry because he faced consequences.
"There was not one word about the tragedy he caused," said the prosecutor, adding that W had never even apologized to al-Shirbini's family which shows "he still does not grasp the harm he did."
The prosecutor rejected the view of the defence that W had acted in the heat of the moment, saying, "He knew what he was doing and acted with the coldness of ice."
