Busfahrer: „Ich wollte, dass alle in Sicherheit sind“
On the outside, the wounds of Peter Spoth (62) are hardly visible, except for a few dark spots on the lip. That was ruptured after the attack on his bus on Friday. "And the nose isn't broken either," he notes. "The doctor thinks it'll heal on its own." But there are deeper traces of the day when the German-Iranian Ali D. (34) tried to set the bus on fire, then pulled out a knife and injured ten people. "It keeps coming up," says Spoth. "And I see all the people who are injured." The images won't let him go. "I can't say I'm sleeping all night."
Peter Spoth sits in a café in Lübeck-Kücknitz, his home district, in front of him a black coffee. The sun is shining and the bus driver is wearing a fresh, white shirt. What a contrast with the pictures taken after the attack. They show him with a bloodstained face and a blood-spattered shirt.
He'll never forget what happened. "I left for Travemünde on Friday at the ZOB at 1.15 pm," recalls Spoth. Up to the Solmitzstraße in Kücknitz everything was normal. "The bus was pretty full. All seats were occupied. Some people were standing." At the stop in front of the Aldi on Solmitzstraße, he had loaded a wheelchair. "A lot of people got in, even in the middle of the articulated bus, and I can't look beyond that."
Spoth drives off again - but he only gets a few hundred meters away.
"Suddenly two ladies ran forward screaming. They shouted: "A psycho!" and "fire!" As he looks into the inside mirror, he sees flames in the middle of the accordion joint. "They were almost three feet high."
Quickly, Spoth stops the bus on the right side of the road. "I opened all the doors and shouted: All passengers get off the bus now! And get away from the bus!'"
Spoth watches most of the passengers fleeing the vehicle, some in panic, he hears screams. "I ran backwards because the wheelchair user was still sitting there." Passengers help him to lift the handicapped person out.
Meanwhile, the fire is getting bigger. It's already blazing up to half the height of the bus. "The plastic of the joint began to melt and drip onto the road." Spoth runs forward and grabs the large powder fire extinguisher. "Everything was already pretty smoky." He manages to discharge two or three quenches at the area of fire. Suddenly the perpetrator stands in front of him and hits him in the face. "He must have had an object in his hand," Spoth suspects. Because the blow is so violent that he falls backwards on his buttocks. "I felt the blood running down my face."
He is able to recognize the perpetrator, who apparently wants to go after him again. "He shouted: "Fire not out" or something." He speaks broken German, the perpetrator has a dark complexion and wears a thick jacket. Spoth points the fire extinguisher at the man, but at that moment courageous passengers grab the perpetrator and drag him off the bus into the bushes. "I kept spraying," Spoth says. He succeeds in suffocating the flames. "I thought, "Well, you did it. And people are all out." He is all the more horrified when he notices the many bleeding victims as he gets out of the car. "It was terrible to see that." Police and emergency services have arrived. He hadn't notice the knife and the danger he himself was in on the bus.
He's given a green sign saying he's slightly injured. "I called my wife and told her I was in the clear. Only the shirt would be filthy - and the undershirt."
Once more he went into the bus to get a handbag for a lady. "She said it had everything in it, IDs, money and all." He finds the bag covered with extinguishing powder, the handle torn off. "I saw a green bottle at the scene of the fire, there must have been ethanol in it. You could smell that too."
It could have been a lot worse, he thinks, even for him. "Just a year ago, I had a major bypass operation on my heart. That was my wife's main concern." He remains silent for a moment. "You know," he says, "I'm not a hero. My wife is a hero to me. I just wanted to put out the fire. And that all the people were safe. That was my thought from the beginning. That's what I was focused on. That's all."
BBM
The alleged attacker is 34. He came to Germany at the age of 6. He went to school in Germany. He served in the army. How come he would speak broken German?