A former officer of East Germany's communist secret police, the Stasi, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for shooting a Polish firefighter at a border crossing between East and West Berlin 50 years ago.
Martin Manfred N, 80, was convicted of murdering Česlav Kukučka, a 38-year-old Polish citizen, in March 1974, a Berlin court said in a statement.
The verdict can be appealed. The accused, from the eastern city of Leipzig, did not speak during the trial, according to German media.
Kukučka tried to get officials at the Polish embassy in East Berlin to let him go to the West by telling them he was carrying an explosive device, which was actually a fake.
The city was then divided by the Berlin Wall.
Kukučka was passing through the Friedrichstrasse border crossing known as the "Palace of Tears" when he was shot in the back at close range in broad daylight.
Instead of being taken to a nearby hospital, Kukučka was transported to a distant Stasi prison hospital on suspicion of terrorism, where he bled to death.
His family was not informed of the true circumstances of his death and his urn was buried in Poland.
The court said that although the defendant was acting on the orders of his superiors, his actions were not justified under either West German law or the laws in force in East Germany at the time.
Key to the case was the reconstruction of a shredded document from 2016 that listed Stasi officers who received awards shortly after Kukučka's death for preventing what was described as a border provocation, according to the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
The accused was awarded a medal for "neutralizing" Kukučka a few weeks after the murder, the court announced.
Martin Manfred N.'s defense attorney asked that he be acquitted, saying that it cannot be proven with certainty that he is the killer or that the killing qualifies as murder instead of manslaughter, which would be time-barred, Tagesspiegel reported.
At least 140 people were killed at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989. Few people have been held responsible for those deaths and face manslaughter charges, if any.
Bonus video:
