A schizophrenic asylum seeker from Somalia escaped his hospital guards during a permitted visit to the cinema in Germany on Thursday, only being recaptured around 9 hours later.
This past Thursday, Mursal Mohamed Seid, 24, was escorted from his enforced stay in the Mainkofen District Hospital in Lower Bavaria to the local cinema in the local town of Plattling in order to watch Inside Out 2. Under the guise of asking to use the toilet, he managed to escape the sight of his guards and fled the premises, according to the Bild.
Instead of immediately calling the police, the two staff instead elected to return to the hospital just under 2 miles away first, meaning Seid had a head start of 10 minutes from his initial escape and the first emergency call.
The asylum seeker, who was flown by the UNHCR refugee resettlement program to Germany in 2018, had been imprisoned in the Mainkofen District mental hospital since 2022 after he viciously murdered his 52-year-old roommate in a homeless shelter.
According to the court records, Seid allegedly believed there were two people trapped in his roommate’s body, and he had to get them out. He did so by stabbing him 111 times with a knife, causing his guts to spill out while he was still alive, and then beheading him.
He had previously attempted to cut “Satan” out of his own body, and repeatedly been in trouble with the police at this time. Due to this mental health diagnosis, the court ruled he could not be imprisoned for the offense.
Seid was eventually recaptured around 9 hours after fleeing, with the public being warned not to approach him during that time. He was taken into custody by police in a local supermarket car park in Plattling.
Joachim Herrmann, the center-right Interior Minister of Bavaria, was furious as to why Seid was allowed to go out to the cinema in the first place.
“I will initiate a thorough investigation into why the district hospital even allowed this highly dangerous man to go to the cinema,” he told the Bild.
Adam Ahmed, a Munich-based criminal defense attorney, said that in these situations you must “look closely” at the history of the patient. “Relaxations are usually built up gradually. A patient like this can of course manipulate and feign trust. If someone has a history like this, you have to be very careful with relaxations,” Ahmed said.
“Normally, two security guards are present at such an outing, and preventive detainees are only taken out in handcuffs. I cannot judge whether that was the case here.”
