New details have emerged in the case of the murder of a Ukrainian teenage basketball player in the German city of Oberhausen. In particular, the Essen police said on Tuesday, 13 February, that they had no specific indications of xenophobic motives for the knife attack on 17-year-old Volodymyr Yermakov, which resulted in the young man's death in hospital, DW reports.
The police reported that "everything currently indicates that this is a sudden escalation of violence by the 15-year-old main perpetrator".
A special investigative commission has been set up to investigate the incident.
The Kyiv Basketball Federation previously claimed that the Ukrainian athletes were attacked "simply because they are Ukrainians".
"After an exhaustive interview of witnesses and analysis of the evidence, nothing specifically points to a xenophobic crime," the Essen police and prosecutors said in a joint statement.
Witnesses to the attack, cited by the German tabloid Bild, claim that Yermakov and his teammate Artem Kozachenko unsuccessfully tried to avoid a confrontation with 15-year-old Mert V. and his accomplices, who had repeatedly provoked Ukrainians.
The attacker, according to witnesses and a police officer quoted by the newspaper, pulled out a knife and attacked the boys "like a madman", stabbing them nine times. He also stabbed members of his company who tried to calm him down.
"It was obvious that he did not care if he killed anyone. During the arrest, it was not clear that he regretted anything," Bild quoted an unnamed police officer as saying.
Artem Kozachenko survived and was taken to the intensive care unit of a hospital with serious injuries.
According to available information, Mert V. was the only one who used the knife. The German teenager with Turkish roots had been detained by the police on several occasions in the past, including for robbery and inflicting grievous bodily harm. The 14-year-old assistant of the attacker, who was suspected of serious crimes, was also on the police's radar.
Volodymyr Yermakov fled the Russian war in Ukraine, first to Poland, and in the summer of 2023 to Germany, where he played in the youth team of the ART Giants basketball club from Düsseldorf.
"The Ukrainian, who was only 17 years old, was a member of the main squad of our youth team in the U-19 Bundesliga, was a nominee for the German U-18 national team and even played with our pros from time to time," the club said in a post on its Facebook page following the young man's death. The club initiated a fundraiser to help the victim's family.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said that it had taken "special control over the investigation into the murder of a Ukrainian basketball player in Germany" and that the Consulate General of Ukraine in Düsseldorf had held talks with the head of the Essen police.