A German civil servant who was convicted in Spain for double murder has entered early retirement and may retain his pension entitlements, Germany’s Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig ruled on Thursday.
The court decided that for his pension to be revoked, he would need to be convicted by a German court.
The court rejected a disciplinary lawsuit by the Federal Employment Agency to revoke the pension.
The man, born in 1975 in Saxony-Anhalt, had been a civil servant since 2002 and retired early in 2011 due to permanent incapacity for service.
In April 2019, the man led his estranged wife and their two sons, then aged 10 and 7 to a remote cave in Tenerife. He killed the 39-year-old woman and the older son. The 7-year-old managed to escape.
In 2022, a Spanish court sentenced the man to life imprisonment for double murder and attempted murder, as well as to prison terms of 23 and 16 years.
A life sentence in Spain can be reviewed after 25 years at the earliest.
During the oral hearing, Germany’s 2nd Senate clarified that if the conviction had been before a German court, his pension would have been revoked.
This would apply for an intentional crime and a prison sentence of two years or more. It decided that the issue was whether the convicted man had violated the free democratic basic order with his actions. However, the crimes committed by the man for private motives would not be covered by this, the Senate said.
The employment office argued that the man’s actions violated human rights and thus the free democratic basic order. They argued that the wife’s murder should be considered a gender-specific act, a femicide.
But the Senate said this term is not defined in the German legal system and added that the Spanish court did not classify the act as femicide.
The murderer’s lawyer stated that his client had paid all compensation claims to the surviving son and the relatives of the woman. This amounted to around €300,000 ($349,000), the lawyer said.