Cologne hostage crisis

This article is about the 1995 hostage crisis in Cologne-Deutz. For the 2018 hostage-taking that occurred in Cologne central station, see 2018 Cologne attack.

Cologne hostage crisis
Cologne Cologne (North Rhine-Westphalia) Show map of North Rhine-Westphalia Cologne Cologne (Germany) Show map of Germany
Location	Rheinparkweg Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Coordinates	50° 56′ 37,8″ N, 6° 58′ 28,3″ E
Date	28 July 1995 10:40 – 17:44 (CEST)
Attack type	Shooting, bomb threat
Weapons	Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun Explosive vest (unusable)
Deaths	3 (including the perpetrator)
Injured	3
Perpetrator	Leon Bor

On 28 July 1995, a hostage-taking occurred during a sight-seeing tour in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. A gunman held 22 passengers hostage on a parked tourist bus after killing the bus driver. The hostage situation lasted for seven hours. He injured a passenger as well as a police officer outside with gunshots, then fatally shot another hostage. The gunman was fatally shot when police stormed the bus.

Hijacking

Immediate bus tour and murder of bus driver

The bus was scheduled to drive two hours through Cologne's Innenstadt, starting from the square of Cologne Cathedral. Besides the bus driver and later hostage-taker, there were 25 passengers on board, the majority middle-aged or elderly, along with two children and two teenagers. ^{[1] [2]} After 40 minutes, while in the district Deutz, the bus stopped to let passengers take pictures of the Tanzbrunnen on a parking lot outside the Koelnmesse. ^[3]

During the stop, 31-year-old passenger Leon Bor stood up and walked to the driver's seat, where he pulled out a gun and shouted "Russian mafia" and for ordered everyone to stay still. Two minutes later, at 10:42, he shot the bus driver, 26-year-old Raimund Geuer, in the head. Bor ordered the tour guide in the frontmost seat, 33-year-old Lisa Klein, to close all the blinds, which she did while attempting to dissuade Bor from continuing the hijacking in English. Bor then tasked another passenger with going to the luggage compartment outside and getting his bag, but this woman fled. Klein was sent out afterwards, with Bor teling her in English "Come back or I kill the children". Klein complied and was sent to the back of the bus after bringing him the luggage. At around the same time, a construction worker noticed the bus and called police due to the blacked out windows. ^[4]

Police arrival and first escapes

At around 11:00, a police car arrived at the scene to investigate the construction worker's call. As a policeman approached the bus, he was shot in the stomach, causing life-threatening injuries. The other officer fled, but returned to recover his colleague with backup several minutes later. While Bor was busy unloading his bag and changing his blood-soaked clothes, Lisa Klein noticed that Bor's gunfire on police had broken the glass of the rear window, roughly two meters off the ground, and after quietly extending the hole, she jumped out. The remaining hostages consisted of ten Germans, four Americans, four Austrians, two Japanese, one Argentine, one Turk and one Israeli. Bor had redressed into a balaclava, black military fatigues and a green flak jacket, with silver cylinders attached around the waist, which he claimed were sticks of dynamite. To prevent more escapes, he gagged and tied up the other hostages with duct tape and cable ties, then ordered them to crouch in their seats. A 12-year-old boy attempted to flee through the front during this process, but he was caught and beaten by Bor. ^{[4] [5] [6]}

A SEK unit of fifty officers arrived at the scene shortly after. The gunman opened communications with police via the built-in car phone of the bus. Bor, still claiming to be a member of the Russian mafia, made immediate requests for a Russian translator. ^[6] Despite getting a clean view of the gunman during the phone talks, SEK decided against shooting the hostage taker from a distance. The officers had been informed that the gunman was wearing a striped shirt and jeans, due to which believed the masked man in military gear was a second assailant. Team leader Volker Lange thus reasoned that they would need to kill both gunmen at the same time to ensure the safety of hostages. This meant that they would not make use of their firearms until they could either confirm only one gunman or if they saw both in the windshield, the only area that wasn't obscured, for a clear shot. Bor had hung loose wiring around the front of the vehicle and threatened that he would blow up the bus if police attempted to come close, holding wires in his hands to mimic a detonator. ^{[7] [8]}

Inside the bus, Bor repeatedly threatened to shoot hostages, forced the passengers to take pictures of him with a polaroid camera he provided, as "souvenirs" he claimed, and talked incessantly about seemingly personal anecdotes, including about the prior year's Cave of the Patriarchs massacre and a trip to Paris. ^[9] Hostages said that they had serious difficulty understanding Bor since he always yelled when speaking and constantly mixed basic German and English, evidently holding little fluency in either language, though he would sometimes talk to himself in Russian. ^{[2] [4]}

At around 15:15, a Russian language interpreter was brought to the scene, but no progress for release was made. Bor still insisted on speaking directly with police, demanding in English and German to talk "with government" and to "somebody big", later saying he wanted to contact with "the Russian leader" ("der russische Anführer"). ^{[2] [10] [6]}

Second escapes

At 15:20, while Bor was busy using the phone an 11-year-old boy managed to slip out of his bindings. Leaving his shoes, he attempted to sneak towards the broken window in the back, but was noticed by the gunman. As Bor took aim, 53-year-old Heinz Buchner, a tourist from Vienna, stood up and shouted "For God's sake, please not the child!" ("Um Gottes Willen, bitte nicht das Kind!"), distracting the gunman who instead shot Buchner in the right shoulder, critically injuring him in the lung. The boy managed to escape the bus unharmed. ^{[3] [11]}

By this point, the battery of the car phone ran out and due to the heat and poor ventilation, Bor then ordered Buchner to go outside to fetch water and a fully charged cell phone from police, threatening to kill Buchner's 55-year-old wife if he didn't return; she would later be recovered with light injuries from broken glass. ^[11] Buchner hoisted himself through the rear window and for four minutes, he crawled towards police, occasionally stopping to catch his breath behind cars for cover. Police secured Buchner and brought him to Eduardus Hospital to treat his gunshot wound. ^[12] At 16:40, Bor fired several stray shots into the street outside. ^[7]

Second murder and end of hostage crisis

At approximately 17:25, Bor began individually questioning the hostages about their countries of origin. When a 64-year-old woman, a tourist from Baden-Württemberg, ^[13] responded that she was German, the first to name this nationality, Bor shot her in the chest. He then took a picture of her corpse. ^[5]

The killing spurred SEK into acting ("Notzugriff  [ de ]") and they verbally announced to Bor that they would bring him a cell phone to use at the front of the bus. Two officers approached and one broke the door open with his baton. ^[14] At the same time, eight SEK officers entered through the rear window and opened fire on Bor, who had moved towards the exposed front of the bus. He was hit in the head by a rifle round from one of the snipers positioned on a nearby rooftop and in the torso by a sidearm from the SEK team leader. ^{[2] [10] [15]} Fatally wounded, Bor collapsed to the ground and shot himself in the head before he could bleed out. His death by suicide went unnoticed due to the immediate situation until a post-mortem medical examination, which showed the fatal gunshot was inflicted at close range. ^[16] The supposed explosives on his vest turned out to be silver-painted wooden rods. ^{[5] [17]}

The incident had been filmed by several film crews since the shooting of the police officer. WDR cameras captured the escape of the 11-year-old boy and Heinz Buchner, as well as the SEK unit breaching the back of the bus. ^[2]

Perpetrator

Leon Bor (Hebrew : ליאון בּוֹר) was born on 10 July 1964 in Russia as Leonid Borschevsky (Russian : Леонид Борщевский; also Borichevski; Russian : Боричевский). ^{[13] [18]} He moved to Israel in 1989 and lived in Ramat Gan. Bor worked as a real estate agent in the Tel Aviv metro area and had defrauded several hundred thousands in Deutsche Mark through bounced checks. ^[6] He served in the Israel Defense Forces for one month, but was discharged for mental problems, following an assault on a superior officer. Bor's former bunkmate in the army told Tagesthemen that he was not surprised of Bor's involvement in the hijacking, stating that he was nervous, irritable, and prone to violence. ^[2] He received an Israeli passport for the name Leon Bor in 1993 and moved to the United States the same year. ^[16]

Bor had travelled to Germany via the Netherlands, having boarded a train to Mainz in Amsterdam. He had arrived in Cologne the morning of the hijacking. The central train station was two minutes on foot from the pick-up location of the sight seeing bus. ^[18]

Shortly after the hostage crisis, Avi Primor at the time the Israeli ambassador to Germany, claimed that Bor had previously committed several acts of mass murder in Israeli and similarly taken photos posing with the dead victims, asserting that Cologne police was withholding this information for the sake of the victims' families. German authorities denied having knowledge on any prior murders committed by Bor and later went on to state that they found no evidence for Primor's statements. The ambassador's office subsequently retracted the allegations. ^{[6] [16]}

Aftermath

Heinz Buchner was lauded as a hero for his selfless actions on the bus, though tabloid newspapers incorrectly claimed that Buchner had physically jumped into the bullet's path to save the child. ^[3]

Among Bor's possessions, a parachute, an altimeter, a sextant, and a portable navigation system were found, leading investigators to believe that Bor intended to hijack a plane, either before settling with the sight-seeing bus or for use in a later part of the hijacking. ^[16]

North Rhine-Westphalia Police were unable to come up with a motive. The hijacking's two fatalities were killed after Bor was certain they were German, which led media to suggest that Bor had anti-German sentiments. ^[10] All witnesses stated that Bor seemed unpredictable, angry, and never stated what he wanted to achieve. On 29 July, still in recovery, Heinz Buchner told reporters that Bor was completely unreasonable, saying, "In hindsight, I can tell you with certainty that I'm right to say that he [Bor] was a complete madman, a rebel, a completely sick human being, a psychopath, who was not with any group, who simply peformed these actions because he felt like killing. [...] He did not want money, he demanded nothing, he just wanted to kill". ^[2]

State prosecutor Karl Uckermann called Bor a "political murderer" and that he dressed "like a professional terrorist". Police press speaker Winrich Granitzka said given the "professional, determined execution" of the crime, he would speculate that Bor was "either mentally ill or setting a political beacon". Granitzka specified that there was no way to truly determine the motive, though he was in agreement with the assessment of Uckermann, who described Bor as "an absolute sadist who enjoyed killing". Criminal psychologist Frank Stein wrote in his 2003 book Grundlagen der Polizeipsychologie that Bor's background and behaviour pointed towards him being a "mentally ill, psychopathic offender" and that the hijacking was committed solely to fulfill a power fantasy to feel a sense of control for previous "conflicts and failures in his life". ^{[18] [19]} The Global Terrorism Database entered the hostage-taking and murders into their statistics. ^[20]

See also

• Gladbeck hostage crisis
• Egged bus 300 hostage crisis
• 1988 Negev bus hijacking
• Bus 174 hijacking
• Manila hostage crisis
• Lutsk hostage crisis

References

1. Geiselnahme in Deutz (28 July 1995); Hier und Heute WDR
2. Skrupelloser Täter nimmt über 20 Menschen als Geiseln (2024); WDR
3. "Der Schock sitzt noch tief". Kölner-Stadt-Anzeiger. 27 July 2005.
4. ""Sie setzen ihr Leben aufs Spiel!": Ehemalige Geisel der Kölner Busentführung vor 29 Jahren dankt den Rettern". Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (in German). 2024-02-20. Retrieved 2025-01-23.
5. Allen, Arthur (30 July 1995). "Standoff ends as German police kills Israeli gunman". Daily News. p. 2.
6. Lange, Volker; Stinauer, Tim (22 December 2021). Mittendrin: Ein Kölner Polizist erzählt (in German). Edition Lempertz. ISBN   978-3960584339.
7. "Die 90er Jahre in NRW: Alarm beim Mittagessen – Geiseldrama von Köln-Deutz". Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (in German). 2019-10-11. Retrieved 2025-01-23.
8. "Ein Mann für spezielle Einsätze". Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. 8 April 2021.
9. "Police don't know why gunman hijacked bus". Eugene Register-Guard. 30 July 1995. p. 3.
10. "Tour bus hijacker is slain". Reading Eagle. 29 July 1995. p. 7.
11. "Österreicher rettete bei der Kölner Geiselnahme einem elfjährigen Jungen das Leben: Der Terrorist und der Held". Berliner Zeitung (in German). 1995-07-30. Retrieved 2025-01-23.
12. "Das blutige Geiseldrama von Köln: Vor 20 Jahren an der Messe in Deutz: Ein Junge springt um sein Leben". EXPRESS (in German). 2015-07-29. Retrieved 2025-01-23.
13. Wollin, Amos (1995-07-31). "Geiselnehmer ein "absoluter Sadist"". Die Tageszeitung: taz (in German). ISSN   0931-9085.
14. WDR (2024-03-11). "Kriminalfälle aus NRW: "Wir konnten nicht davon ausgehen, lebend aus dem Einsatz rauszukommen"". www1.wdr.de (in German). Retrieved 2025-01-23.
15. ""Papa macht neu": Als Polizist sterbenden Jungen im Arm hält, kommen ihm die Tränen". FOCUS. 20 September 2021.
16. "Geiselgangster gibt weiter Rätsel auf - WELT". DIE WELT (in German). Retrieved 2025-01-23.
17. "German bus-hijack motive still a mystery". J. 1995-08-04. Archived from the original on 2024-05-26.
18. "Politmörder oder Irrer? - WELT". DIE WELT (in German). Retrieved 2025-01-23.
19. Stein, Frank (2 September 2003). Grundlagen der Polizeipsychologie: Grundlagen, Fallbeispiele, Handlungshinweise. Hogrefe, Verlag für Psychologie. ISBN   978-3801717261.
20. "Incident Summary for GTDID: 199507280009". Global Terrorism Database. Archived from the original on 2018-07-31.