Three guilty of targeting family
ReutersThree men were convicted by a German court in an attempt to blackmail the family of former Form 1 champion Michael Schumacher.
Yilmaz T, 53, was sentenced to three years in jail for threatening to upload 900 personal photos, nearly 600 videos and confidential medical records.
His 30-year-old son was sentenced to six months probation for assisting and teaching traktorport. A former security guard at the Schumacher family denied any involvement and was sentenced to two years in prison.
Schumacher has never appeared in public since the 2013 ski accident, resulting in serious brain injuries. His family keeps his medical condition private.
The father and son admitted most of the charges and Yilmaz T, a nightclub bodyguard in Constance in southern Germany, told the court that what he did was “very, very disgusting”.
“I realized I was in jail the next day. I will answer for that.”
In his confession, he said he had obtained a hard drive twice from security guard Markus F, who was accused of passing sensitive documents in a “five-digit sum”.
I believe that a hard drive will never be restored.
The judge accused security guards of allowing blackmail attempts to begin. The Schumacher family’s lawyers said they will challenge his probation.
Markus f has been working at home 18 months before the Schumacher ski accident.
Schumacher’s wife Corinna asked him to digitalize private photos of his family, according to the defense. They argued that after the contract was terminated, the material disappeared.
The court heard that the father and son had emailed the Schumacher family samples of the stolen files.
The recording of the phone call to the Schumacher family was also played in court.
In one of the conversations, Yilmaz T told his family that instead of trying to blackmail them, he was willing to act as a broker to return documents and identify their sources with what he called a “clean transaction.”
The family reminded local authorities in Switzerland that they tracked the root causes of the threat to Germany, and the three were arrested in June 2024.
Thilo Damm, a Schumacher attorney, said the verdicts were too lenient because of what the “final betrayal” was, and they planned to appeal.
“We don’t agree with everything the court said. You can rest assured that we will exhaust all legal possibilities,” he said.
He also expressed concern that despite multiple searches of the defendant’s property, the hard drive was still missing.
“We don’t know where the missing hard drive is, I don’t have a crystal ball, but the back door could pose another threat,” Mr. Dam said.
