Neuer's former teammate jailed 5 years after his fake death

He was considered a bright prospect with the Bundesliga heavyweight Schalke 04. He trained with Germany and Bayern Munich’s goalkeeper Manuel Neuer in Shalke’s youth academy. He got lost in his native Congo in 2016 and pronounced dead. His wife collected 152 million Ksh insurance. He was found in Germany in 2019 alive and well. And now he has been sentenced to almost four years of prison for fraud, along with his wife.

What a strange and bizarre story about Hiannick Kamba. According to the court’s ruling, the Congo native made a scam along with his wife Christina von G. to fake his own death, just to collect insuring money. According to Kamba, it didn’t happened like that. In 2016 Kamba, who finished his unsuccessful football career, went to his native Congo and supposedly died in a car crash, according to Bild, after which his wife collected 152 million Ksh insurance. What is interesting, Kamba’s have previously taken a 76 million Ksh insurance policy, and after Hiannick’s ’death’, Christina wanted to collect 510 million, but the company rejected the application. Before he went to Congo, Kamba was working at Evonic, which also gave his wife a 12.7 million Ksh as a compensation.

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And then, in March 2018, Kamba reported to the German embassy in the capital Kinshasa and told officials that his mother and wife had him kidnapped and dumped him in the jungle so they could cash in on the insurance scheme, according to German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. He claimed they took all of his money, papers and mobile phone, leaving him with no means of contacting the outside world and stopping his alleged kidnappers from claiming the insurance money. Kamba returned to Germany, very much alive, and started working as a chemical technician again at Evonik in 2019. It is not clear why Evonik decided to take him back on again after he deceived the company, resulting in it making a payout.

„The defendant is an intelligent person who wanted to make his master. He would have found other courses of action to get in touch earlier” said the prosecutor Hauke Schlick, while Michael-Konrad Wolff, Christina von G.'s lawyer, said: "She was as surprised by the news of his death as anyone else. Her main concern was initially how she could have the body transferred to Germany"

Both defendants remained silent during the trial, which ended with them receiving equal sentences of three years and 10 months.