AUTONEWS

The tragic story of the former Rolls Royce designer

When they rang at the door of Ian Cameron's house, in Herrsching, Germany, the former Rolls Royce designer opened the door — and was immediately stabbed. The woman managed to escape: she climbed the wall to her neighbors' house, where she alerted the police. The body of the 74-year-old Briton was found last Friday, but the news was only released this week by the German newspaper Bild. The suspect remains on the run.

The attempted robbery turned into a “violent crime”, explained the German police. Video surveillance footage shows the killer cutting the electricity cables in the garage, where several valuable objects were stored. Only then did he ring the doorbell.

After stabbing the designer and vintage car specialist, the suspect was seen by neighbors leaving the house on foot. They described him as a Caucasian man, who was between 1.80 and 1.90 meters tall and was wearing a dark blue hooded sweatshirt and light-colored pants. On his hands he had gloves; on his back, a dark red backpack.

This backpack was later found on the edge of Lake Ammersee by a team of 30 Bavarian police officers, with clothes inside, which indicates that the man had changed several times. Inside, there were also products from the Edeka supermarket, about 1.3 kilometers away from the British designer's house — twenty minutes on foot. Before committing the crime, the man passed by this supermarket, from where the Bavarian police recovered video surveillance images, which they used to launch an alert looking for clues about the suspect, whose identity is still unknown.

The police have not yet been able to determine whether the stabbing was the result of a failed robbery at the mansion or whether there was some other reason, explained The New York Post.

Ian Cameron began working at Rolls Royce after BMW acquired the brand in 1998. Until 2013, the year in which the British designer retired, he launched several models, namely the Phantom VII, in 2003 — the first Rolls Royce under the the German company's purview — and, six years later, the Ghost.

BMW said it was “unbelievably sad and in shock” at Cameron’s violent death, regretting what happened, wrote Automative News Europe.

A 22-year old Serbian man has been arrested in France a week after the fatal stabbing in Germany of a 74-year-old man, named locally as former Rolls-Royce car designer Ian Cameron.

Bavarian police said that after a public manhunt the suspect had been located in a flat to the north-east of Paris and arrested by French special forces on Thursday.

Ian Cameron, 74, was reportedly attacked last Friday night at his home in Herrsching, south-west of Munich. His wife fled to a neighbour's house and raised the alarm.

Police later released an image of the suspect taken in a local supermarket before the killing. They said the man had been in the Herrsching area for several hours.

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