Man Goes Insane After Visit To Auschwitz

Man Goes Insane After Visit To Auschwitz

By Staff Reporter

A MAN stabbed two people in a Lake District youth hostel after having his mind deranged by a visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Darren Foster, 35, had been suffering from a severe mental illness for years before he went on holiday to Poland.

But when he returned after his visit to Auschwitz, his family were so alarmed by his deteriorating condition that they got him sectioned and admitted into a psychiatric hospital in his native Birmingham.

Carlisle Crown Court heard that it was after absconding from there that he travelled to Kendal and booked himself into a single room at the youth hostel there.

Prosecutor Ken Hay told the court that in the middle of the night, wearing sunglasses and a hooded top, Foster fetched two bread knives from the kitchen, went upstairs to the dormitory where four men were sleeping, and attacked two of them.

One suffered a relatively minor wound to his throat before managing to retreat upstairs, but the other was more seriously hurt – and scarred for life – by a series of slashing blows to his arms, face and stomach.

“Mr Foster lashed out at him in a frenzied attack with both knives,” Mr Hay said. “The man put his arms up to protect himself, but received several slashing blows before he collapsed onto his bed.”

One of the other guests managed to call the police, and they found Foster in another room crying: “Have you got him yet? I’m frightened.”

In mitigation, defence barrister Greg Hoare said: “It is perfectly plain that he is in the grip of a serious mental illness.”

He said Foster had been held in a secure unit, but when the weather got too hot last summer inmates were allowed to move into a cooler, less secure area, and he simply walked out.

Foster, who psychiatrists say is suffering from treatable manic depression, pleaded guilty to charges of unlawful wounding and inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent to do so. He was ordered to be detained in a medium secure psychiatric unit indefinitely

http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/viewarticle.aspx?id=468202