A 28-year-old electrician has gone on trial charged with the attempted murder of the Borussia Dortmund football team and their entourage by detonating three homemade bombs next to their bus as they travelled to a match.

The man, identified only as Sergej W, also stands accused of aiming to financially enrich himself from the attack, having betted that the devastation he expected it to cause would lead to the collapse of the club’s share price.

He had allegedly bought thousands of put-options to enable him to profit on the drop in the club’s stock market value in the case of any players dying. Borussia (BVB), which has an annual turnover of around €400m , is the only football club in Germany that is registered on the stock exchange.

The defendant’s lawyer Carl Heydenreich said on Thursday that his client had not intended to kill the players inside the coach but merely “scare them”, pointing to the fact that only one metal bolt had penetrated the exterior of the coach.

Speaking to German TV media on Wednesday, Heydenreich had liked Sergej W’s actions to that of an inept football player: “If an unchallenged player can’t find an open goal from five metres, you inevitably ask yourself: did he not want to score, or was he incapable?”

Dortmund’s sporting director said the comparison was “extremely tasteless”.

The case has been described as unprecedented in German judicial history, shocking the country and the sporting world. Sergej W, a Russian-German who moved to the Black Forest with his family from their home in the Russian Urals in 2003, faces a life sentence if found guilty.



The bombs exploded close to the bus on 11 April, as the team was leaving its hotel south of Dortmund around 7pm on its way to its semi-final Champions League encounter with AS Monaco. The force of the blast was so great, one metal shard was found 250 metres away.

Miraculously no one was killed, but a policeman and the Spanish defender Marc Bartra were injured. Of the other 27 people on board, some suffered minor scratches and many suffered from shock, which some players have said continues to affect them to this day.

Sergej W, dubbed the Black Forest Phantom by German media, worked at the university hospital in the southern city of Tübingen, where colleagues described him as unassuming and conscientious as well as a mysterious loner.

Prosecutors have portrayed him in the charge sheet as cold-blooded and scheming. They will argue that he amassed the equipment needed to carry out the attack in the months beforehand, building parts of it in the laboratory at his workplace.

They will tell the court that on the night before the attack, Sergej W took his equipment into the woods adjacent to the hotel and, under a full moon, constructed the three devices, placing at least 65 finger-length metal bolts into each of them before camouflaging them in green paint and planting them in yew hedges close to where the bus would be driven.

Sergej W, who had booked himself into a room at Hotel l’Arrivée where the team was also staying, is said to have observed the bus’s journey from the bathroom window of his suite, detonating the devices remotely once the vehicle had reached the entrance of the hotel driveway.

The electrician has so far kept his silence, except to express his innocence. He has said he was holidaying in the hotel at the time of the attack.

The court will hear eyewitness statements from the players and entourage, including the former team manager Thomas Tüchel, as well as their supervisors, translators and physiotherapists.

The bombs caused two windows on the right of the rear of the bus to break, and shrapnel embedded itself into the upholstery. Bartra bled profusely after glass shards penetrated his right arm, which was broken near the wrist.

Unsure whether they were safer inside the bus or out, the players got out and laid Bartra on a blanket by the side of the road. Physiotherapists tended to his wounds and sprayed water in his face in an attempt to stop him from losing consciousness before ambulances arrived.

Meanwhile, as the news filtered through to the BVB stadium, the 60,000 fans gathered therewere told the match was cancelled.

Amid the commotion, Sergej W is said to have gone to the hotel restaurant and ordered a meal of steak and sweet potatoes.

In the following days, suspicion fell on Islamic State, as Sergej W allegedly left fake messages supposedly from the terror group at the scene – as well as neo-Nazis, football hooligans and anti-fascists. Members of the rightwing populist Alternative für Deutschland were quick to blame chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy for the attack, assuming an asylum seeker was responsible.

Sergej W’s alleged connection to the attack was made by a hobby stocktrader from Austria, who became suspicious of the curiously high number of put-options bought on BVB stock and contacted his bank. The bank traced the IP address used to buy the put-options to the internet address of the hotel.

Sergej W was eventually arrested 10 days after the attack on his way to work.