A serial rapist who terrorized Europe in a raping and killing spree while evading police has been arrested by German authorities as he faces difficult days in the hands of the law.
notorious serial rapist, Dariusz Pawel Kotwica
A notorious serial rapist who murdered, raped and maimed his way across Europe including Britain and taking advantage of its open borders to evade police and find new victims in six countries over several years has been arrested.
Experts said last night that Dariusz Pawel Kotwica, 29, could be the first serial killer to have struck across Europe.
Kotwica has confessed to the frenzied stabbing of an elderly woman and her husband in Austria, as well as killing a pensioner in Sweden a month earlier.
Kotwica became really notorious after he daubed bizarre phrases on an Austrian woman’s naked body after raping her and police say he has told of his ‘joy’ at torturing, claiming he was urged to kill by inner voices. An official report claims that Kotwica, who has convictions across Europe, lived for ‘several years’ in the UK and detectives fear he has committed ‘serious crimes’ here.
map showing areas the serial rapist terrorized in his raping and killing spree
The details of Pole's killing spree emerged for the first time in a report commissioned by the Home Office on the benefits of police across the EU sharing DNA and fingerprint records. It says he was sought by forces across Europe after the double murder of a married couple in Vienna on May 21 this year. The bodies of Gerhard Hintermeier, 75, and his wife Erna, 74, were discovered at their home by relatives.
They had been bludgeoned and stabbed several times while written in brown paint on the woman’s naked body was either the Latin phrase ‘tantum ergo’ meaning ‘only then’, or the chemical element ‘tantalum’.
Police identified Kotwica by forensic evidence left at the crime scene that was shared across Europe under the Prum data-sharing scheme, which the British Government wants to join. Kotwica was caught by German police on June 8 and extradited to Austria.
According to police there, he not only ‘made immediately a comprehensive confession’ to the murder of the elderly couple and admitted he ‘raped the dying old lady’ but also revealed he had committed another murder just weeks earlier in Sweden.