Powerless (20/30)

Powerless (20/30)

Nine-year old Benjamin Steiner has been kidnapped from his music teacher's home. Till Ritter and Felix Stark are assigned to work with the parents, Linda and Hermann Steiner, who spend many anxious and fearful hours before the kidnapper finally makes contact: a DVD shows the kidnapped child to be unharmed. The ransom is to be paid in two parts.The first 500,000 euro is to be handed over by Linda Steiner under close police supervision at Alexanderplatz. The kidnapper, however, makes no move to escape; instead he starts handing out the cash to passers-by and is finally arrested without difficulty. He wants to make the second ransom demand to the parents in person - but stubbornly refuses to say where he is keeping Benjamin.It emerges that the kidnapper is named Uwe Braun - a man with no fixed abode, no bank account, no contact with the family and thus no clues for the police to go on. When the parents finally meet their son's kidnapper in the interrogation room, however, it transpires that Hermann Steiner, a bank manager, does actually know the man. He just can't remember where he knows him from. Uwe Braun, on the other hand, obviously remembers very well.