Swissinfo.ch:

The death of the Iranian asylum seeker who held 13 people hostage on a Swiss train on February 8 is considered ‘an injustice’ by his family.

The 32-year-old Iranian Kurd died on February 8 at around 10.15pm, after holding the twelve passengers and the locomotive engineer hostage for almost four hours on a regional train from the north of Vaud that had come to a halt at Essert-sous-Champvent in canton Vaud. The man not only had an axe and a knife, but also a hammer. He died after being fatally shot by a member of the Vaud police intervention team.

On RTS’s Forum programme and on 19:30 news bulletin, the hostage-taker’s brother, contacted by telephone in Iran, explained: “We don’t support what he did, but he didn’t deserve to be killed. It’s an injustice. We want the Swiss state, and the police who killed him and who shouldn’t have, to at least return the coffin to us,” he added.

Also interviewed by RTS, a confidante of the thirty-year-old, whom he had called during the hostage-taking, tried unsuccessfully to convince him to put an end to it. “I begged him several times to stop what he was doing. He replied: ‘big sister, this is the end of my life'”. His motives were unclear, but he had expressed his insistence on having contact with a member of staff at an asylum seekers’ centre.

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