Judgment | The men opened fire at each other in a car on the highway: The reason remained unclear

Real Finland On Monday, the district court sentenced two men who tried to shoot each other in a moving car to unconditional imprisonment.

The charges were about events in Turku on a Monday afternoon in May. The men were passengers in a car driven by a woman. A 44-year-old man sat in the co-driver’s seat and a 36-year-old man in the back seat.

At a busy intersection on Tampere’s main road, the men opened fire on each other. The 36-year-old received gunshot wounds to the head, the other man survived without injuries.

In court it was not possible to determine which of the men fired first. The motive for the shooting also remained unclear.

According to the court, the 44-year-old man and a relative of the 36-year-old man had had some kind of dispute that the 36-year-old knew about. However, he had not threatened the 44-year-old before the shooting, and there were no arguments between them, the verdict says.

Before the shooting, the 36-year-old had gone to the 44-year-old’s apartment, in his own words, “looking for a gang.” The car had first visited Alko, which was followed by some sort of skirmish in the parking lot. According to the court, the 36-year-old grabbed another man by the collar of his jacket and shot once in the air. After that, the men and the woman got back into the car and started driving.

According to the court, the 44-year-old shot at least four times in the car and the 36-year-old shot three times, so that the cartridge fired the third time got stuck in the gun.

Both the defendants appealed in court to emergency protection and only said that they defended themselves from another’s unlawful attack. The district court did not believe this.

The court noted that each of the men knew the other was armed. According to the law, both of them would also have had the opportunity to leave the situation if they wanted to before the shooting.

“The threshold for using a weapon in a tense situation has been low on both sides, and the defendants must both be considered to have accepted that the situation could lead to the use of a weapon,” the court ruled in the verdict.

In addition to attempted murder, the district court convicted the men of firearms offenses and causing danger. According to the court, they endangered the life and health of the woman driving the car as well as other road users.

44 years old Robert Veikko Alexander Stenroth was sentenced to seven years in prison. The district court toughened Stenroth’s punishment because he has committed numerous violent and firearm crimes in recent years. 36 years old Tino Mertsi Allan Lindberg received a five-year prison sentence.