Oury Jalloh (1968-2005) was born in Sierra Leone and had lived in Dessau as an asylum seeker since 2001. On 7 January 2005, he was taken into custody by the police and hours later burned to death, with his hand and feet bound, in a cell at a police station in Dessau. In the aftermath, his family and civil society initiatives such as the Initiative in Gedenken an Oury Jalloh demanded, and continue to demand, a complete investigation of and explanation for his violent death. The police continue to claim that Jalloh set himself on fire, despite having been in handcuffs and lying on a fire-resistant mattress. The case of Oury Jalloh remains legally contested and is one of the best-known examples of institutional racism in Germany.
The Initiative in Gedenken an Oury Jalloh (Initiative in Remembrance of Oury Jalloh) was founded in the direct aftermath of Oury Jalloh’s death by burning and has accompanied the insufficient state investigation in Sachsen-Anhalt with its own investigative assessments and civil society pressure. These efforts have led, for example, to the opening of a criminal case on the basis of a second autopsy financed by donations which found several bone injuries on Oury Jalloh’s corpse determined to have taken place directly prior to his death. In November 2021, the results of another independent forensic analysis that utilized a crime-scene reconstruction of the fire. It demonstrated that it would have been impossible for Oury Jalloh to have set himself on fire, given that he was bound at four points. It further established that a fire accelerant such as petrol must have been used, given the size and ferocity of the fire, and that the cell door must have been kept open during the fire to ensure sufficient airflow to keep the fire burning.
We can thus assume that multiple Dessau police officers must have abused Oury Jalloh on 7.1.2005 so severely that he was already incapacitated, or perhaps already dead, when they doused him in a fire accelerant and set him alight to cover up the injuries they had already inflicted upon him.
The Initiative in Gedenken an Oury Jalloh, which is supporting his family in their lawsuit, is seeking to force a resumption of the investigation so that justice may finally be attained for this capital offence, carried out 17 years ago by employees of the state.
