Michael Schumacher’s manager picked up call from an unknown number ‘demanding £12million or photos of racing legend would be leaked onto the dark web’, blackmail trial hears

Racing legend Michael Schumacher’s manager told a German court how she took a call from a man demanding £12 million or he would ‘release pictures’ of the F1 driver ‘onto the dark web’.

Sabine Kehm, 60, who has worked for the Schumacher family for more than 25 years, was yesterday the first witness to testify in the bombshell blackmail plot that involves a father and son and former bodyguard of the seven times world champion.

They are said to have demanded the money after ex security guard Markus Fritsche, 53, was dismissed from his job at the race ace’s Swiss home in 2021 but not before taking hundreds of private family pictures with him.

Jointly accused with Fritsche is nightclub bouncer Yilmaz Tozturkan, 53, and his IT expert son Daniel Lins, 30, who uses his mother’s maiden name.

Schumacher, 55, has not been seen in public since a horrific ski accident in the French Alps in 2013 and before the case started the family filed a motion to request details of his health and injury were not discussed in public.

Ms Kehm told the court in Wuppertal near Dusselford: ’I got a call, and it was a number we didn’t recognise, so at first we didn’t answer as we don’t usually to unrecognised numbers.

‘But it kept calling and calling so in the end I answered, and it was a man who said he had pictures of Michael, he said that if the family didn’t want them published onto the dark web he could help.

‘He said he was a go between, and we would have to pay 15 million Euro, he said the money was for the pictures and his go between service.’

The material arrived via a secure email address Lins had set up for his father in June this year, to Schumacher’s office at his family home in Gland, Switzerland and police were alerted and the trio arrested two weeks later.

Ms Kehm said: ’I recognised them as private photos and when I saw the I thought they could have only come from an employee of ours.

‘I was sure it had to be someone from our internal circle that worked for us, I was suspicious from the first moment that it was someone who no longer worked for us.’

Ms Kehm described how a nurse involved with Schumacher’s care following his accident ‘appeared to get on very well with Markus Fritsche’.

She added: ‘I remember I used to see Fritsche and this particular nurse standing together talking.

‘But eventually she left, we had issues with her, we had problems with how care was delivered.’

Earlier Tozturkan – who works at a nightclub in Konstanz on the German-Swiss border, told the court he was given the material – 1500 images, 200 videos and confidential medical details by Fritsche after meeting him in a café.

Tozturkan told the hearing: ’He said that he was in possession of this material, and he asked if we could do anything with it. I said: “I will ask but we will definitely be able to do something”.’

The data was on two hard drives and four USB sticks but it emerged during the proceedings that one hard drive Tozturkan said he had hidden at his mother’s house had not been recovered.

He added: ‘I was going to try and sell them first but when I didn’t get any interest that’s when I contacted the Schumacher family.’

Tozturkan said that he understood the pictures had been passed to Fritsche ‘by a nurse’ and said that they showed Schumacher in ‘poor health’.

He told the court: ‘It’s easy to say things with hindsight, I just thought I could make a little bit of money from the story.’

The case continues.