BERLIN, Oct 14, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - A former East German secret police officer faces a verdict Monday in a murder trial, accused of shooting dead a Polish man trying to flee to the West 50 years ago.

If ex-Stasi officer Martin Naumann, 80, is found guilty, it would be the first conviction of its kind, almost 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Naumann is accused of killing Czeslaw Kukuczka, 38, by shooting him in the back at close range as he sought to flee through Berlin's Friedrichstrasse border point in 1974.

Three West German schoolgirls returning from a class trip witnessed the killing at the crossing, dubbed the "Palace of Tears" for its frequent sad farewells.

Now adults, they were called to testify during Naumann's trial in Berlin.

Prosecutors have called for Naumann to be jailed for 12 years, branding the shooting "an insidious case of murder".

Naumann has denied the charges through his defence lawyers but declined to address the court.

The defence has argued there was no proof Naumann was the shooter -- or that the killing constituted murder rather than manslaughter, on which the statute of limitations would have expired.

In all, at least 140 people were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, and hundreds more died while trying to flee East Germany by other means.

If convicted, Naumann would be the first former Stasi officer to be found guilty of murder, Daniela Muenkel, the head of the Stasi archives in Berlin, told AFP.

This would have "great symbolic significance" in Germany's efforts to atone for the injustices of the communist dictatorship, Muenkel said.

If Naumann is acquitted, she said, "this would probably mark the end of the legal reappraisal" of crimes committed in the former East Germany.

- Bomb threat -

On the day he died, Kukuczka had gone to the Polish embassy in East Berlin and threatened to detonate a dummy bomb unless he was granted passage to the West, according to recent historical research.

Embassy staff are believed to have approved Kukuczka's request while alerting East German authorities to the threat.

Stasi officials handed Kukuczka an exit visa and led him to the crossing where Naumann was waiting, concealed behind a screen, according to prosecutors.

Archival documents suggest the secret police were under orders to "render harmless" the Pole, a common euphemism found in Stasi documents for the liquidation of political opponents.

Initial investigations into Kukuczka's death in the 1990s led nowhere, but the case was picked up again after Poland issued a European arrest warrant for Naumann in 2021.

He was then charged with murder in October last year.

The decades-long delay illustrates the challenges Germany has faced in delivering justice to victims of the former communist government.

During the 1990s, a total of 251 people were charged with crimes committed on behalf of the Stasi, according to official government records.

However, two-thirds of the criminal proceedings ended either with an acquittal or without a verdict and only 87 defendants were convicted, with most receiving mild sentences.