The CFO of the green power company Innogy was seriously injured in the attack.
(Photo: dpa)
Haan, Brussels Around three and a half years after the acid attack on Innogy’s CFO at the time, Bernhard Günther, investigators arrested a man on suspicion. The responsible public prosecutor in Wuppertal announced that the man was burdened with a DNA trace.
The suspect, a 41-year-old Belgian, was reportedly arrested last Tuesday in the Belgian province of Limburg. The suspect’s DNA profile matched a DNA trace found at the crime scene.
Bernhard Günther, who now works as CFO at the Finnish energy company Fortum, was delighted with “this important step in the investigation process”. “I now very much hope that the evidence seized during the arrest will lead us to the actual commissioner of this assassination attempt on my person,” he told the Handelsblatt.
In March 2018, after a jogging session with friends, Günther was attacked by two men near his home in Haan near Düsseldorf and acid was poured on his face. The then 51-year-old was able to save himself badly injured home. Although his life and eyesight were saved in an emergency operation, he remained badly marked. At the time, the attack shocked the German economy in particular. There had been no similar assassination attempt on a German manager before.
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The second arrest
In October 2019, the investigations by the Wuppertal public prosecutor’s office and the Düsseldorf homicide commission had already led to an arrest. At that time a suspect was arrested in Cologne. But it was difficult to prove it. The suspect was released.
In the course of the ongoing investigation, the evidence of another person involved in the crime who lives in Belgium, as the investigators have now announced. The Belgian investigative authorities were therefore asked to help. After a European arrest warrant was issued, the suspect is currently in custody in Belgium. A short-term delivery is intended. The extensive investigations, in particular the evaluation of seized evidence, continued.
The authorities currently do not want to provide any further information “for tactical reasons”.
Above all, Günther hopes that the arrest will bring him “a big step closer to his goal of identifying the middlemen and the person who commissioned this attack on me. Our persistence pays off. We’re not giving up, ”he said.
Günther suspects clients in the professional environment
The energy manager himself has a specific suspicion about the client, as he described two years ago in an interview with Handelsblatt: “I was already sure at the time that the motive could only lie in the professional environment – and all the findings since then have this conviction even more. ”Even then, he had a certain person in mind, but did not want to comment on it.
Read the interview here:
Günther had repeatedly criticized the investigations of the public prosecutor’s office. Now he thanked the detectives in Düsseldorf and Belgium for their work and his lawyers, “who, despite some setbacks, have not let up”.
The victim of the acid attack, together with his former employer, offered a reward and hired private investigators himself. This initiative led to the first arrest two years ago.
Innogy itself was in a difficult situation at the time. Just a week after the attack on the CFO, the company was confronted with a takeover offer from Eon. Günther reported back in the spring and negotiated good conditions for the Innogy workforce with the then boss Uwe Tigges. After the takeover, he remained on board as the only board member and worked with the current Eon boss Leonhard Birnbaum on the integration of Innogy into Eon.
He left Eon a year ago and took over the position of CFO at Fortum in February. The Finns control, among other things, the German electricity producer Uniper.
More: The Innogy CFO on the acid attack: “Whistleblower had inside knowledge.”
