Story By:  Ana Marjanovic, Sub-Editor: Michael Leidig, Agency:  Newsflash

A German court has overturned a 12-year sentence against a man who raped an 11-year-old girl while wearing a wolf mask because the punishment was too severe.

The Federal Court of Justice – Germany’s highest court of civil and criminal jurisdiction – overturned the guilty verdict against Christoph K. because it considered his 12-year jail sentence to be followed by a move to a secure psychiatric clinic as too harsh.

This means the 46-year-old electrician will face a full retrial. Last time around, the child and her parents were spared being asked to give evidence because he confessed. Whether that will be the same during the retrial was not revealed.

K. had been found guilty of dragging the 11-year-old girl from a pheasant park a few hundred metres from her parents’ house in the Obergiesing borough of Munich into a bush in broad daylight in summer 2019.

There, dressed in a creepy wolf mask and white gloves, he covered the schoolgirl’s mouth as he raped her.

He had been released early from a previous prison sentence for another sex offence in late 2018 on conditions, but those conditions did not include permanent supervision.

He committed the shocking crime six months later, and, in 2021, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison followed by an indefinite period in a closed psychiatric ward following his conviction for serious sexual abuse of a child.

But the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe has now overturned the verdict, reasoning that the prison sentence was set too high considering the time he will have to spend in the psychiatric ward.

K. must now be retried at the Munich I Regional Court.