German highway fatality on Mallorca: murder trial begins

Palma - The murder trial against two Spaniards who allegedly threw a German vacationer from northern Hesse onto a highway on the vacation island of Mallorca in October 2022 is scheduled to begin on Thursday.

This date was announced by the lawyers of the victim's family to the German Press Agency. No information was available from the court on Saturday.

The 20-year-old was hit by an uninvolved car while lying on the road. He died.

The public prosecutor's office and the lawyers for the victim's family are demanding a prison sentence of 25 years each. In addition, the two men are to compensate the relatives with almost 200,000 euros.

The trial is scheduled to last two weeks. The motive of the alleged perpetrators is unclear.

The police have not ruled out the possibility that they wanted to rob their victim.

Investigators initially assumed that the German had strayed onto the highway himself in a drunken state after a night of partying at the Ballermann in the island's capital Palma.

"We were repeatedly told directly that this could never have been an accident," the Mallorca newspaper quoted the family as saying. "He would never have walked onto a highway and laid down there."

The police eventually found camera footage showing the 20-year-old at the Ballermann looking for a friend who was traveling with him.

Three minutes after he disappeared from the picture, the German was run over by a car one and a half kilometers further on the MA-19 freeway towards Palma, not far from Playa de Palma, according to the investigation.

The distance could not be covered on foot in that time, said Ángel Ruiz, head of the National Police's homicide squad, in October 2023.

His team had arrested the two suspects shortly beforehand. In order to track them down, the investigators had to check around 100,000 license plates and traffic cameras before they came across the suspected murder vehicle - according to an eyewitness, a white van from which the German had been thrown onto the road.

The two Spaniards have been in custody since their arrest.