Two Rügen fishermen go on trial over dead seals found in a fishing net

The trial in Bergen auf Rügen

Proceedings opened on Friday, 13 November 2026 at the Bergen auf Rügen branch of the Stralsund district court. The defendants are a 67-year-old fisherman and his 44-year-old son, who employs the older man. Prosecutors in Stralsund allege that the pair accepted, at least conditionally, the deaths of at least five grey seals. In early 2026 the prosecutors issued penalty orders requiring payment of 90 daily fines, but both men objected, which is why the case went to trial. Neither has commented on the allegations, and the son's lawyer read out a statement saying his client was absent from the site for a long stretch of the alleged period. The statement added that the net had been rendered unfit for catching fish during that time by opening certain sections.

How the dead seals were found

The 44-year-old fisherman set the roughly 670-metre net off the southeast coast of Rügen in mid-September 2024. Within days, dead seals were washing up almost daily on beaches on Rügen and along the Greifswalder Bodden. The court, citing prosecutors, says at least 19 of the protected animals had swum into the net and died by 12 October. Prosecutors allege the men saw the deaths during an inspection and took no protective measures, after which five more grey seals died in the net by 14 October. On 15 October, divers sent by the authorities found five carcasses directly at the net's gear, lying beneath the net rather than inside it, the prosecution representative told the court. Prosecutors also allege that the men removed dead animals from the net and disposed of some elsewhere to conceal them, and that some carcasses bore rope marks suggesting they had been dragged away. In total, at least 24 grey seals died in the net during the first half of October 2024.

Autopsy and the net's removal

The autopsy report points mainly to suffocation: one animal's lungs held foamy, reddish fluid, and another's windpipe was partly filled with digested food. Museum director Burkard Baschek said those signs were clear evidence of suffocation. He also said that the photographed carcasses, some with bulging eyes and large bruised areas, showed injuries consistent with blunt force. Baschek filed a criminal complaint with the Stralsund prosecutor's office, and the suspicion is that the animals swam into the net and drowned there. A former police investigator, now 62, told the court that the men eventually removed the net, apparently out of frustration over the accusations and the investigation. According to him, reported dead seals fell sharply within days of the net's removal, and he said there was effectively no other logical explanation. He also pointed to irregularities in other years.

Earlier deaths and what comes next

Judith Denkinger, then the marine mammal curator at the Deutsches Meeresmuseum, said in November 2024 that the run of dead seals stopped shortly after the net was removed. She put the October 2024 count in the area at 44 dead grey seals, against 43 for the whole previous year along the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania coast. Another earlier account gave 44 as the number found within a month along the entire coast, more than in the whole previous year. Reporting on the case also describes a smaller cluster of seal deaths in 2023, when the net was already in the water, and conspicuously many deaths on the north coast of the Greifswalder Bodden between September and December 2017. Museum director Baschek wants to attend the hearing, though a museum spokeswoman said that was not certain. Coverage of the first day gives no date for a verdict.