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CRIME

Man ‘kills girl, 14, he met online in forest’

Police have launched a murder investigation after a 14-year-old girl was found stabbed to death in woods outside Berlin. The prime suspect is her older boyfriend who she met in an online chatroom.

Man 'kills girl, 14, he met online in forest'

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Named by Bild newspaper as Alyssa B., a passer-by found the teenager in a forest on the south-east edge of Berlin at around 3pm on Monday afternoon with a large knife stuck into her stomach.

Her suspected killer was found sitting on a nearby train track and was arrested.

Police said they had little doubt that she was stabbed by 20-year-old Maurice M., from Düsseldorf in North Rhine-Westphalia. The pair had apparently met on a German internet chat room, Jappy, in May.

Last weekend he made the 600-kilometre journey to see her in Eichwalde, Brandenburg, despite her parents' disapproval, the Tagesspiegel newspaper said on Wednesday.

He apparently developed very strong feelings for Alyssa B., through regular chatting online, classmates of the murdered girl told the Tagesspiegel. “He wanted to marry her,” said one pupil. Another said he had threatened to kill her if she refused.

It is thought, Bild said, that she was trying to break things off with him and when the pair met in person they had a huge fight, said eyewitnesses. “They were really yelling at each other,” a pensioner who was near the attack site told the Tagesspiegel.

A friend of Aylssa B., Willy H., went with the pair into the woods to look out for his classmate. Maurice M. is thought to have hit him over the head with a beer bottle, investigators said. The 15-year-old boy is in hospital.

Maurice M. fled the scene. Officers arrested him at a nearby train station where he was sat on the lines. He had a suicide note in his pocket, the Cottbus state prosecutor said on Tuesday.

READ MORE: Police find missing woman set in concrete

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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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