Mr Wolters’ most recent interview.
Translation credit: Ulrike U:
X: SY still assumes a missing person case, the Braunschweig public prosecutor's office and the BKA assume a murder. How do you work together? Does SY have any other findings? Is there different evidence?
W: That is probably because SY has been investigating the case since 2007 and at that time it was assumed that the girl could still be alive, that she could only be missing.
In Germany, we have only been investigating since 2017, and at the time when the whole investigation began here, we already had such solid evidence that the girl was dead that it didn't make sense to let it go on under a cloak of secrecy, but it was absolutely clear that it had to be classified as a homicide.
In addition, in Germany we as public prosecutors only take action if there has been a crime. And if someone is missing, that is regrettable but it doesn't have to be a crime, everyone has the right to keep their whereabouts secret from others, but thank God there is not always a crime behind it. That's one point why we have to say a missing person case couldn't have happened like that at the Braunschweig public prosecutor's office. The police, yes. They also investigate missing persons cases, which is different with the public prosecutor's office.
That is the reason why we are conducting criminal proceedings.
The second part, translated by Ulrike U:
Part 2 of the recent interview with Wolters.. investigation and parents
W: I can only say that I myself am partly surprised by what I am supposed to have said and what I read and what others are supposed to know about our investigations. In fact, I have unfortunately had to hold back for a year. We have deliberately only given out certain information and nothing much new could be added to this information.
I am also very unpleasantly surprised when I read that we will be making an indictment in 3 months, for example, as was recently reported in the British media. Then I am quoted as saying things that I have never said before in my life. This annoys me and I then have my hands full to put it right and have to explain that I never said that and that it does not correspond to the facts.
I'm getting to the current state of affairs, at the moment it is not foreseeable when and whether we will come to a conclusion of the investigation, I cannot give a time frame.
X: That is, did you or did you not achieve the goal of going public last year?
W: It has to be said that this long period of time where we did not talk about the case and did not make a decision on how this case could possibly end, speaks for the fact that the appeal was successful. In the first few days we were overrun with tips from all countries, mainly Germany, Great Britain and Portugal, and now we simply need the time to process these many tips seriously.
X: That means in a certain way, if I may ask, did you use the media to achieve success?
W: Exactly, in this case we used the media quite consciously as a medium to get more attention and to be noticed. For us as a small German public prosecutor's office, it is very difficult to reach British tourists who would otherwise not notice us. We depend on our messages being conveyed and who better than the media to do that?
X: to reflect on this, how many interviews have you actually given?
W: actually I can't count the interviews any more, in addition to the interviews there are hundreds of emails and phone calls that I've been dealing with for a year, you can't really imagine it, of course we knew there would be a big response, but I personally underestimated how long this media echo would last.
X: Maybe we can look back at the situation a year ago. What was known at that time, what was the reason why you went public at that time?
W: Last year was the time when we had to go public with the suspicion against a German because we could say with a high degree of certainty that in 2007 he had taken the almost four-year-old British MM in a hotel complex in PDL into his power and also murdered her. I can't say anything at the moment about how the whole thing went down in detail. I couldn't at the time either because the investigations are still in a hot phase that takes a long time.
That may be different in other cases, but the scope of this case is beyond anything we have had in other cases, at least here in the region.
Of course, this is also due to the great interest and the fact that several countries are involved.
This is different from a procedure that only takes place in Braunschweig.
(Now comes something about CB, I'll leave that out, we know who he is).
X: he was registered in Braunschweig, so the case came to the Braunschweig public prosecutor's office.
W: Exactly, he lived here, that's how we came to these proceedings like the virgin to the child.
We certainly never imagined when we heard about the MM case in 2007 that this case would at some point have a connection to Braunschweig. In German criminal procedure law, jurisdiction is based on the last place of residence.
X: Especially in England, where the case has caused quite a stir, how can you be so sure that MM is dead and what do you tell the parents?
W: We have evidence that allows us to draw only one conclusion, that the girl is indeed dead I am not allowed to publish the evidence at the moment, that will happen at an appropriate time.
His number was in the radio cell where the crime took place, but that is only one piece of the puzzle.
X: was that also investigative tactics like before or is that more?
W: Of course, the fact that we gave the number is a tactic because we also wanted the public to help us. We had to do this because we are still looking for the user of the other number.
X: Have you also been in contact with MM parents? They went public very aggressively shortly after her disappearance and the media say that they still hope to find their daughter alive.
W: There is no direct contact between the public prosecutor's office and the parents, nor was there at any time. There was only a connection via the German police and the British police individual contacts, but last year in connection with our press conference.
We deliberately wanted to prepare the parents for the fact that we would issue a statement in the case of their missing daughter.
We didn't want the parents to be run over by the fact that there might be media on their doorstep and they might not have heard about it yet. We wanted to prepare the parents for the fact that there is news in the case of their daughter, but we didn't say anything in terms of content. This was reported several times by the British media which was wrong, it was just to spare the parents which the British media did not do.
There was another report that it was not a question of publishing new reports every day, but rather to let calm return without communicating every step in public. It was also about giving the parents peace of mind and not being constantly confronted with the case.
