Featured Image Credit: Getty/AFP/Getty/Stringer
Topics: Crime, World News, Netflix
Emily Brown
A father in France decided to take matters into his own hands after Germany refused to extradite the man responsible for killing his daughter.
It was 1982 when André Bamberski lost his daughter, Kalinka Bamberski, who was just 14 years old.
Kalinka had traveled to Lindau, in Bavaria, to spend her summer vacation with her mother and stepfather, Dieter Krombach.
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But during Kalinka's trip, Krombach was found to have drugged his stepdaughter, and caused her to die of suffocation.
Krombach admitted to administering a substance to Kalinka, claiming it would help her tan more easily, but the cocktail of substances she ended up having injected into her body proved fatal.
The stepfather was found guilty in 1995, but Germany refused to extradite him, and the French ministry of law refused to issue an international warrant for his arrest.
As a result, Bamberski felt he wasn't going to get justice for his daughter's death.
As per The Independent, the father recalled: “Those legal proceedings caused me to suffer so much. I felt like I couldn’t trust anyone any more.”
Bamberski spent years knowing what Krombach had done to his daughter, but since authorities weren't going to bring him over the border, he decided to arrange for him to be kidnapped and taken to France - a decision which later became the subject of a Netflix documentary.
Bamberski carried out his plan in 2009, when he traveled to Bregenz in Austria, near the German border, and put up adverts asking for assistance in transferring Krombach to France.
One of the people who responded was a resident named Anton Krasniqi, who in turn enlisted the help of two Russian mobsters to get Krombach into a car outside his home.
They then drove him, bound and gagged, across the border into France.
Once Krombach was over the border, Bamberski put in an anonymous call to police and told them he had brought a fugitive to justice.
Krombach was found with his hands and feet bound outside the prosecutor's office in Mulhouse, close to the German border.
Bamberski admitted he didn't look into the legal consequences of kidnapping Krombach - if he did, he said he 'would not have gone ahead with it'.
Two years after the kidnapping, Krombach was finally sentenced to 15 years in prison for causing intentional bodily harm resulting in unintentional death.
Bamberski managed to avoid jail time himself for the kidnapping, but he was handed a one-year suspended jail sentence for orchestrating the crime.
He defended his actions in his 2022 interview, saying: “I fully respect that people can be morally against my removal of the doctor from Germany to France, but everyone must respect that - legally - I did nothing wrong.
"That was proven by the judicial system."