Brazilian Justice frees German consul accused of killing her husband

The Brazilian Justice has ordered the release of the German consul Uwe Herbert Hahn, accused of having killed her husband, Walter Herni Biot, a Belgian national, in the neighborhood of Ipanema, in the south of Rio de Janeiro.

Judge Rosa Helena Penna Macedo has accepted the request of the suspect’s defense, considering that there is a flagrant excess of time for the interposition of the sentence.

“Indeed, the patient has been in custody since August 7, 2022 and, according to information extracted from the website of the Court of Justice, it is recorded that as of today’s date the complaint has not been filed, nine days after the expiration of the legal term of ten days,” states the judge’s statement, collected by the Gaz news portal.

Earlier, on August 9, two days after the arrest, the same judge denied the diplomat’s release, claiming that “there were no illegalities” in Hahn’s imprisonment.

The consul was arrested on Sunday, August 7, as a possible suspect in the death of her husband, whose corpse was in an apartment with about thirty injuries that could correspond to sadomasochistic practices.

Biot, who had been married to Hahn for 23 years, died according to the autopsy of a subarachnoid hemorrhage, cranial contusion and cranioencephalic trauma caused by a blunt action, according to the Medical-Legal Institute of Rio de Janeiro, quoted by the newspaper ‘O Globo’. The body presented 30 injuries such as schimosis, scabies and other wounds in arms, legs, trunk and head, so that the specialists consider that they are incompatible with a fall, as the German diplomat defends.

“The injuries are not typical of a fall from that height and are distributed over various parts of the body, including the so-called natural defense areas such as forearms, hands and legs, as well as fatal head injuries,” explained a police spokeswoman, Camila Lourenço. “Most of the wounds are recent ecchymosis, but there are indications of some old ones as well,” she has pointed out. “The type, format and distribution of these injuries suggest a practice of sadomasochism, so further investigation is needed,” she argued.

The German diplomat alerted the emergency services last Friday and claimed that the Belgian had suffered a fall. She then claimed to the agents that her husband was taking medication to sleep and that he used to drink a lot, almost every day.