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CRIME

Hamburg ‘honour killing’ suspect now faces rape inquiry

The 23-year-old Afghan-German arrested in the suspected honour killing of his 16-year-old sister last week is now under investigation for rape, police said on Thursday.

Hamburg 'honour killing' suspect now faces rape inquiry
The suspect in Hamburg on May 16. Photo: DPA

“We are looking into other suspicions of rape in another incident,” said a spokesperson for the public prosecutor’s office in response to media reports.

German daily Die Welt reported Thursday that the man had met a young Afghan woman online, who he drugged and raped with an accomplice in Hamburg. He allegedly gloated about the incident online.

The man admitted to police that he killed his sister last week because she had turned away from her family, DDP reported. The family immigrated to Germany from Afghanistan 13 years ago, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported in its online edition. Both siblings have German citizenship.

The girl died early on Friday morning of multiple stab wounds in Hamburg’s Sankt Georg district.

The man had already been prosecuted for assaulting his sister and others. He was sentenced in March on an assault charge to one year and five months without possibility of probation, the Hamburg prosecutor’s office told German press agency DDP on Monday.

The man had requested his March sentence be deferred, prosecutors said. He was notified in writing on Wednesday – a day before the stabbing – that the request had been rejected.

Police were also investigating earlier claims that he assaulted two of his sisters, including the girl stabbed last week.

A series of six honour killings in Berlin – including the shooting at a bus stop of 23-year-old Turkish woman Hatun Sürücü – shook Germany in 2005. Sürücü’s youngest brother, Ayhan Sürücü, later confessed to killing her because he did not approve of her Western lifestyle.

CRIME

German police swoop on gang of foreign dating scammers

German police said Wednesday they had arrested 11 suspected members of a Nigerian mafia group behind a large-scale dating scam.

German police swoop on gang of foreign dating scammers

The Black Axe gang was involved internationally in “multiple areas of criminal activity”, with a focus in Germany on romance scams and money-laundering, Bavarian police said in a statement.

The dating trick was a “modern form of marriage fraud”, police said.

“Using false identities, the fraudsters for example signalled their intention to marry and in the course of further contact repeatedly demand money under various pretexts,” police said.

The money was subsequently transferred to Black Axe in Nigeria “via financial agents”, authorities said.

In the process, the gang used a “commodity-based money laundering” scheme where products, often with a seeming “charitable purpose” were bought and delivered to Nigeria.

Some 450 cases of romance scamming had been reported in the region of Bavaria in 2023 alone, with the damages rising to 5.3 million euros ($5.7 million), police said.

The suspects, who all held Nigerian citizenship and were aged between 29 and 53, were arrested in nationwide raids on Tuesday.

Law enforcement swooped on 19 properties, including both homes and asylum shelters, police said.

The Black Axe gang had “strict hierarchical structures under leadership in Nigeria” operating different territorial units, police said.

The group had a “significant influence” on politics and public administrations, in particular in Nigeria.

Globally, the gang’s main areas of operation were “human-trafficking, fraud, money-laundering, prostitution and drug-trafficking”.

Black Axe operated under the cover of the Neo Black Movement of Africa, an ostensibly charitable organisation used as “camouflage” for the gang’s structures.

The action against Black Axe was the first of its kind in Germany, police said.

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