Church youth leader accused of murder

The man suspected of murdering the heir to a Germany banking dynasty led a church youth group and headed a fan club of Frankfurt’s football team that the 11-year-old victim passionately supported, investigators said Wednesday.

Jakob von Metzler was found murdered yesterday, despite his family’s payment of €1m in ransom. Prosecutors said severe bruise marks on the boy’s throat indicate he was likely strangled, although an official cause of death is not expected until Friday.

Mourners, many of them Jakob von Metzler’s classmates, and his siblings, today piled hundreds of flowers at the gate of the family’s Frankfurt villa, not far from where the boy was abducted last Friday on his way home from school.

Magnus Gaefgen, a 27-year-old law student, who grew up in the same neighbourhood as the boy and even attended the same school, has been charged with kidnapping and murder. He has not yet entered a plea, prosecutors said.

A priest at St Bonifatius catholic church in the Frankfurt neighbourhood of Sachsenhausen where Gaefgen lived said the suspect was reliable and seemed to enjoy working with children. Until a couple of years ago, he had led various youth groups, even chaperoning overnight trips.

“He was a helpful and friendly young man,” said Father Richard Weiler.

Friends in the fan club that Gaefgen ran for Frankfurt’s Eintracht soccer team knew the suspect as Maggi and said that he enjoyed travelling.

The soccer team may have been a common ground between Gaefgen and the boy, whose eighth birthday present was a special visit by Eintracht’s former star striker Jan-Aage Fjoetoft.

Prosecutors refused to comment on reports that Gaefgen, who lived alone in an apartment across the street from the bus stop where the boy was last seen after school Friday, had been his tutor.

The principal of the Carl Schurz School, where the boy was in the sixth grade, said Gaefgen was not on a list of tutors approved by teachers.

Police found one million euros in Gaefgen’s apartment today, prosecutors said. The boy’s father, private banker Friedrich von Metzler had paid the same sum in ransom Sunday, which had been demanded in a note. Police said they arrested Gaefgen as he was preparing to leave the country the following day.

Dozens of stricken children bearing flowers or candles gathered at the school today. A teacher was offering counselling to those who wanted to talk.

The boy’s body, stripped to his underwear and bound and wrapped in blue plastic bags, was found under a dock on a lake 40 miles north of Frankfurt, after police said Gaefgen told them where he hid it. Prosecutors said they believed the boy was either choked to death or drowned on Friday or Saturday.

The case caused outrage among Germans, leading Bavaria’s conservative governor and recently defeated candidate for chancellor, Edmund Stoiber, to call for reforms to Germany’s traditionally lenient judicial system.

“We have to consider whether we have had enough horror,” Stoiber said, pointing out that even murderers often have their prison terms shortened for good behaviour.

“Is life in prison really for life?”

Officials in Frankfurt, where the Metzler Bank has been based since 1674, expressed their grief to one of the city’s most prominent families and set up a condolence book in the city hall. The oldest privately owned financial institution still run by the founding family in Germany, the boy was the 12th generation of von Metzlers.

The von Metzlers are major supporters of the arts in Frankfurt, a city known mainly as Germany’s financial capital.