Camera footage

Sometimes we let ourselves be dragged into a case as a lawyer, which turns out to be very different than we had originally thought it would be. You know the saying: there are two sides to every story.

Recently the following happened: a middle-aged couple approached us with the following problem. They felt they had been “cheated and lied to” by a close Turkish friend who they had welcomed in their home for many years and who was a helping hand to them and other foreigners in their apartment complex. “It is not so much about the money, said the man in a stressed and shaken manner, “but because I have considered this man as my friend for years and he has endangered my life for only a few hundred Euros.”

Against better judgment the friend lets the man eat sweets. The man becomes unwell and this friend brings him home and puts him in to bed. According to the woman, at this time the friend and the man are alone for a couple of minutes. The condition of the man then gets worse, so much that he had to be taken to the hospital. After a few ours he is released, but when his wife wants to pay the bill she notices that the bank card of her husband is missing.  The husband and wife suspect their friend of stealing the bank card in the short time that he was alone in the bedroom with the husband. The next morning the couple discovers that there is a small cash withdrawal at two separate locations. They confront their friend but with no result and therefore the couple decides to get legal advice.

The husband and wife would like to have the camera footage of the bank in order to catch the man who did it. The bank however, informs the couple that such camera footage will not be released just like that. Even a request of a lawyer to release the images was not honored, only the public prosecutor can do such a request. This means that couple would need to file a criminal offence claim, something that they would have like to avoid. Eventually they go ahead and file a claim anyhow and the claim is treated seriously. However it turns out that the bank only stores the footage for 3 months! And though the claim had been filed before the three months passes, the request from the prosecutor had not reached the bank on time.

But there is a slight twist to the story. The suspected friend informs that for a couple of years he had an affair with the wife. By coincidence he had found out that she also was having an affair with someone else. As by his saying, the friend gets remorse and ends the relationship with the wife. He says that this makes the wife enraged to the extent that she puts the whole stolen bank card in scene to get revenge on the friend. Eventually the public prosecutor has dropped the case due to a lack of evidence.