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Police probe whether woman was stabbed to death for converting to Christianity

German police said Wednesday they were examining if there was a religious motive in an Afghan asylum-seeker's fatal stabbing of a compatriot, who had converted from Islam to Christianity.

Published: 3 May 2017 16:30 CEST

Police probe whether woman was stabbed to death for converting to Christianity

Chiemsee. Photo: DPA

The female victim, 38, was stabbed on Saturday in front of a supermarket in southern Bavaria by the 29-year-old migrant, police said, in a case that made national headlines.

The stabbing took place in front of the woman's children. The woman subsequently died from her wounds.

Police said motives of the assault have not been determined, and the man has since been interned in a psychiatric hospital.

But they confirmed that they are looking into a possible religious link after learning that the victim, a mother of two who arrived in Germany in 2011, was a Christian convert.

“It's a possibility that we're exploring,” said a police spokesman, adding that the victim and the alleged attacker knew each other even if they were not close.

The man had arrived in Germany in 2013 and was residing at an asylum-seeker shelter.

Germany took in more than a million refugees since 2015, and some have taken on the Christian faith.

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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