On the afternoon of 6 April 1991, Jorge Gomondai died at the Medical Academy in Dresden. He succumbed to the serious head injuries received in a racist attack on a tram a few days earlier. He had spent six days in a coma in intensive care. Several operations could not save him. He died without ever regaining consciousness.
Jorge Gomondai was the first victim of racist violence in Saxony following German reunification.
Jorge Gomondai
Jorge Gomondai was born in December 1962 in the province of Manica, in Mozambique. At that time, Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony; the south-east African country gained its independence in 1975.
In February 1979, Mozambique and the GDR concluded an intergovernmental agreement which, among other things, provided for the temporary employment of young Mozambican workers in the GDR.
Having just turned eighteen, Jorge Gomondai applied for training and work in East Germany. In the summer of 1981, he left Mozambique and flew to the GDR, where he began working in the slaughterhouse of the VEB Fleischkombinat in Dresden.
With the end of the GDR, the intergovernmental agreements between it and the People’s Republic of Mozambique were declared invalid. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jorge Gomondai struggled to obtain a residence permit, a flat, and a job.
Shortly before Easter weekend,1991, he returned to Dresden from three weeks of work in Rotterdam. In the early hours of 31 March 1991, Jorge Gomondai was on tram line 7 on his way home to the hostel where he was staying in the Johannstadt district. Shortly after 4 a.m., the last of the other passengers got off at Platz der Einheit in Dresden’s Neustadt district, and around ten neo-Nazis joined Jorge Gomondai in the last carriage.
This group of East and West German neo-Nazis had already been on a violent rampage through the alternative Neustadt neighbourhood, attacking pubs and beating up at least one other person, with several calls having been made to the emergency services that night. The police had been watching the group throughout the evening, and checked them shortly before they boarded the tram at Platz der Einheit – though without any consequences.
Witnesses later described in court how the neo-Nazis immediately attacked Jorge Gomondai. The men, aged between 17 and 27, hit him, insulted him, and threatened him. They hung from the handrails and made monkey sounds.
Key questions about the further course of the crime remain unanswered. Was Jorge Gomondai pushed out of the moving tram by the neo-Nazis? Or did he try to jump out of the carriage out of fear of his attackers? Police video recordings from the night of the attack were deleted by officers without being analysed. The tram carriage was scrapped without any forensics or technical examination of the door. The delayed, faulty, and incomplete police investigation and the verdict handed down more than two years after the crime in a delayed trial at the Dresden District Court provided no answers. It is undisputed that Jorge Gomondai suffered extremely serious injuries to his head when he fell from the tram and was left unconscious on the pavement.
A taxi driver who saw the motionless man lying on the road after the fall, called the police on the radio. Meanwhile, the two women who had been travelling in his cab provided first aid. Although the police had been observing, accompanying, and filming the group of neo-Nazis all night and had even checked their personal details shortly beforehand, they were not there at the crucial moment. After they finally arrived, other eyewitnesses at the scene testified that Jorge Gomondai had been beaten and pushed from the vehicle.
Despite this, the officers did not react and or begin an investigation. Instead, they claimed that the seriously injured man was drunk and that they couldn’t do anything without him filing a criminal complaint himself.
Jorge Gomondai was subsequently admitted to the intensive care unit of the Carl Gustav Carus Medical Academy in Dresden. He never regained consciousness.
The head of the then mobile task force testified before the Dresden District Court in 1993, revealing that decisive intervention by the police could possibly have prevented the death of Jorge Gomondai.
He died after six days in a coma at 2:45 pm on 6 April 1991. He was 28 years old.
