Firemen from Krems were arraigned because they pulled away the safety blanket they had been holding out and ran away at the very moment at which the suicide, who had for several hours been standing on a ledge on the fifth floor of a Krems apartment building and had threatened to jump to his death, actually jumped. The youngest of the firemen stated in court that he had acted out of a sudden inner compulsion and that he had run away, without letting go of the safety blanket, when he saw that the suicide had carried out his threat. As he was the strongest of all the six firemen, he had dragged the other five, together with the safety blanket, along with him, and, at the very moment when the suicide, an unhappy student according to the newspaper, had smashed onto the square in front of the house to which he had been clinging for so long, they had all, he went on to say, flung themselves to the ground and sustained more or less painful injuries. The court before which the fireman who had been the first to run away and who, as we said, being the youngest and the strongest of them, was arraigned as the chief defendant could not deny the responsibility of the chief defendant and acquitted him together with the other five Krems firemen although, in the nature of things, not convinced of his innocence. The Krems fire department has for decades been reputed to be the very best fire department in the world.

Speleologists

SPELEOLOGISTS