Death of Oury Jalloh

Oury Jalloh (1969 – 7 January 2005) was an asylum seeker who died in a fire in a police cell in Dessau, Germany.

[1] Reportedly he fled from the Sierra Leone Civil War to Guinea, where his parents were already living,[2][3] and came to Germany in 1999, where he applied for political asylum.

In the morning of January 7, 2005, at about 8 am, some street cleaners called the police and reported that a female colleague felt threatened by a drunk man (who was Oury Jalloh).

[5] At the police station, the two policemen took Jalloh to the basement and held him whilst a doctor took his blood to test for alcohol and drugs.

[5] The police suggested that Jalloh had burnt himself to death, using a lighter to ignite the foam mattress he was lying on in the cell.

[6] The official autopsy concluded that the immediate cause of death was likely heat shock to Jalloh's lungs by smoke inhalation.

According to Manfred Steinhoff, the presiding judge, contradictory testimony had prevented clarification of the circumstances and had obstructed due process.

In his closing speech Steinhoff accused the police officers of lying in court and thus damaging the reputation of the state of Saxony-Anhalt.

Beate H. changed her initial report to say that Andreas S. had not turned down the fire alarm twice but rather got up and went downstairs, but she was unable to say exactly when because she worked with her back facing the door.

[6][10] On January 7, 2010, exactly five years after Jalloh died in his cell, the Bundesgerichtshof federal court in Karlsruhe overturned the earlier verdict.

[7] In August 2020 the Landtag of Saxony-Anhalt published a report by special investigators Jerzy Montag and Manfred Nötzel [de] on the Jalloh case, calling the policemen's actions "flawed" and "contrary to the law" (German: "fehlerhaft" und "rechtswidrig").

[13] Based on this opinion, the initiative and the family of Jalloh called for the murder investigation to be reopened by the Federal Prosecutor.