Court halves jail sentence for “ecoterrorist”

Supporters of Camenisch stage a protest outside the court Keystone

A court has reduced a prison sentence for the self-proclaimed anarchist, Marco Camenisch, for the murder of a Swiss border guard nearly 20 years ago.

The jury decided to cut the 17-year sentence, handed down in 2004, to eight years following a retrial in Zurich this week.

The court followed the defence and rejected a demand by the prosecution to lock the defendant up for life or have him undergo psychiatric tests.

“It would be disproportionate to lock the defendant away for an indeterminate amount of time,” the presiding judge said on Tuesday.

Camenisch, who was not present at the two-day proceeding, will be 66 if he serves out the full term of his latest sentence.

The retrial came in response to a Federal Court decision. It had annulled the 17-year jail term handed down earlier on procedural grounds.

The supreme court found such a long prison sentence was not justified because the defendant had already served a long sentence in neighbouring Italy for another crime.

Anti-nuclear power

Camenisch made a name for himself during the late 1970s and 1980s in Switzerland as a militant member of the anti-nuclear power movement.

He was sentenced to ten years for bombing an electricity facility in eastern Switzerland in in the late 1970s. But he escaped from prison and was on the run until 1991, when the Italian authorities arrested him after he was wounded in a shoot-out with a policeman.

He was given a 12-year prison sentence for causing bodily harm and carrying a series of bomb attacks on power lines in Italy’s Tuscany region.

In 2002, Camenisch was extradited to Switzerland to serve the remaining time from his initial prison sentence handed down for bombing the electricity facility in eastern Switzerland.

swissinfo with agencies

Marco Camenisch

1981: Sentenced to ten years in prison for bombing an electricity facility in eastern Switzerland.

1981: Escapes from prison – one guard is killed and another wounded during the breakout.

1989: Suspected of murdering a border guard on the Swiss-Italian border.

1991: Arrested in Tuscany in Italy after a shoot-out with police.

1993: Sentenced to 12 years by an Italian court for carrying out attacks on power lines.

2002: Extradited to Switzerland.

2004: Sentenced to 17 years in jail for murder of border guard by a Zurich court. Verdict later annulled by the Federal Court.

2007: Retrial. Sentence reduced to eight years.