DID EU SERIAL KILLER CLAIM VICTIMS IN UK?
British police investigate Pole who raped, robbed and murdered through 6 countries
A POLISH serial killer who has murdered, raped and maimed his way across Europe is now suspected of carrying out ‘serious crimes’ in Britain, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Experts said last night that Dariusz Pawel Kotwica, 29, could be the first serial killer to have struck across Europe, taking advantage of its open borders to evade police and find new victims in six countries over several years.
Shaven-headed Kotwica has confessed to the frenzied stabbing of an elderly woman and her husband in Austria, as well as killing a pensioner in Sweden a month earlier.
Kotwica daubed bizarre phrases on the Austrian woman’s naked body after raping her and police say he has told of his ‘joy’ at torturing, claiming he was urged to kill by inner voices.
An official report seen by this newspaper claims that Kotwica, who has convictions across Europe, lived for ‘several years’ in the UK and detectives fear he has committed ‘serious crimes’ here.
Forces across the EU including Britain are urgently searching through DNA samples found at old crime scenes to see if any of them can be linked to the Pole, who is behind bars in Austria awaiting trial.
The details of Kotwica’s killing spree emerged for the first time in a report commissioned by the Home Office on the benefits of police across the EU sharing DNA and fingerprint records.
It says he was sought by forces across Europe after the double murder of a married couple in Vienna on May 21 this year. The bodies of Gerhard Hintermeier, 75, and his wife Erna, 74, were discovered at their home by relatives.
They had been bludgeoned and stabbed several times while written in brown paint on the woman’s naked body was either the Latin phrase ‘tantum ergo’ meaning ‘only then’, or the chemical element ‘tantalum’.
Police identified Kotwica by forensic evidence left at the crime scene that was shared across Europe under the Prum data-sharing scheme, which the British Government wants to join. Kotwica was caught by German police on June 8 and extradited to Austria.
According to police there, he not only ‘made immediately a comprehensive confession’ to the murder of the elderly couple and admitted he ‘raped the dying old lady’ but also revealed he had committed another murder just weeks earlier in Sweden. Bo Georg Ehrlander, 79, was dead on the kitchen floor of his home near Gothenburg on April 23. He had been repeatedly stabbed.
According to Austrian police, Kotwica also admitted an ‘attempted homicide after a shoplifting’ in Salzburg in 2012, while records show he had committed grievous bodily harm in the Netherlands in 2011 and burgled a shop in Germany. There have also been reports of possible murders in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. The police report goes on: ‘It seems that he stay several years also in UK. It would be very surprising for us if he have [sic] not committed there serious crimes again.’
Professor David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, said: ‘It shows how important the road network between states and countries is if a serial killer wants to evade detection. It’s a phenomenon we usually see in the US but increasingly we are going to have to acknowledge that because of the Schengen system [which ended passport controls on the Continent] it will also apply to the EU.’