Suspect in fatal kidnap plot once led church youth group

FRANKFURT, Germany -- The man charged with the kidnap-murder of a German banker's son led a church youth group and headed a fan club of Frankfurt's soccer team that the 11-year-old victim passionately supported, investigators said Wednesday.

Jakob von Metzler was found slain Tuesday, despite his family's payment of nearly $1 million in ransom. Prosecutors said severe bruises on the boy's throat indicate he was likely strangled.

Mourners, many of them classmates of Jakob and his siblings, on Wednesday piled hundreds of flowers at the gate of the family's Frankfurt villa, not far from where the boy was abducted Friday on his way home from school.

Magnus Gaefgen, a 27-year-old law student who grew up in the same neighborhood as Jakob and attended the same school, has been charged with kidnapping and murder in the case.

He has not yet entered a plea.

A priest at St. Bonifatius Catholic Church in the Frankfurt neighborhood of Sachsenhausen where Gaefgen lived said the suspect was reliable and seemed to enjoy working with children. Until a couple of years ago, he had led various youth groups, even chaperoning overnight trips.

Friends in the fan club that Gaefgen ran for Frankfurt's Eintracht soccer team knew the suspect as Maggi and said he enjoyed traveling.

The soccer team may have been a common ground between Gaefgen and Jakob, whose eighth birthday present was a special visit by Eintracht's former star striker Jan-Aage Fjoetoft.