János F., who beat Tamás Till to death twenty-four years ago, was arrested on Thursday. Máté Kövecs, the deputy spokesperson of Bács-Kiskun County, told the press that the 40-year-old man had been caught by the police. The criminal department of the Bács-Kiskun County Police Headquarters issued an arrest warrant against the man born in Baja on Thursday.
In fact, in the ongoing criminal proceedings in the detective department for the crime of qualified homicide committed on May 28th, 2000, the Attorney General’s Office concluded that – at the time of the commission and in the interpretation of the currently effective legislation – the statute of limitations applies to non-statutory crimes, such as qualified homicide time calculation is conceptually excluded.
Consequently, if someone commits qualified homicide as a juvenile, it cannot be statute-barred in the same way as if he committed it as an adult.
János F. can therefore receive a maximum of 15 years for the murder committed when he was 16 years old.
The police announced on Tuesday: it was revealed who murdered Tamás Till, who had been missing for more than two decades when he was 11 years old, and whose remains were found encased in concrete on a property in Baja this summer.
Gyula Bogdány, head of the crime department of the Bács-Kiskun County Police Headquarters, said at the ORFK press conference that Tamás Till’s killer was 16 years old when he committed the crime. János F. admitted to the murder of the then 11-year-old boy and testified about it. Major General Attila Petőfi said that since the perpetrator was older than 16 but younger than 18 in 2000, when the crime was committed, his criminal liability expired in 2015. Therefore, he was interrogated as a witness, and the 40-year-old man, currently living in Budapest, was allowed to leave the police station freely despite his confession.
It was János F. who testified at the prosecutor’s office in the summer against his former friend and employer, that they were the killers of Tamás Till. Finally, at his interrogation on November 28th, he admitted what he had done and gave a detailed confession. Gyula Bogdány said that the perpetrator showed remorse during the fourth interrogation and collapsed under the weight of the evidence. The perpetrator referred to his “undeveloped personality” at the time.
Although several political forces called for a change in the law in the case, and Péter Hack, head of the criminal procedure department at ELTE, also told the newspapers that János F. cannot be punished in the case, the position of the prosecutor’s office seems to be different. In the spirit of this, the minister in charge of the Prime Minister’s Office Gergely Gulyás Gulyás also made a statement on Thursday, according to which there is no obstacle to bringing the murderer to justice.
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