Omid Ramdani, 45, was on Sunday found making his way to the Iranian capital, Tehran, Bild newspaper reported on Tuesday. A Berlin state prosecutor spokesman said they were checking information from Iran.

When the police finally caught up with him he told them that he attacked his girlfriend because she cheated on him, but that much of what had been reported about him and the incident was untrue. Local media reports suggested the Tehran police would investigate the case.

Ramdani is said to have tied the 36-year-old identified only as Banafsheh K. to a chair and seriously mutilated her face and body, on October 30 in her flat in the Schöneberg district of the capital.

She survived and was taken to hospital after a man walking along the street outside heard cries for help and called the police. Her ten-year-old daughter had also been tied to a chair and gagged but was physically unharmed.

Spokesman for the prosecutor Martin Steltner told The Local just after the attack happened, that the suspect had Dutch citizenship but was originally from Iraq. The victim was a refugee from Iran whose husband did not live in Berlin.

Her daughter suffered severe shock and was placed in the care of city authorities.

“I saw how medics carried a woman covered in blood into an ambulance,” a neighbour told the Tagesspiegel newspaper. The woman and her daughter were said to have only recently moved into the building.

The Local/jcw/hc