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Suspect ‘confesses’ to Germany murder after Iraq arrest

A failed Iraqi asylum seeker has admitted murdering a teenage girl in Germany after being arrested back in his homeland, authorities in Iraq's Kurdistan region said on Saturday.

Published: 9 June 2018 12:50 CEST

Suspect 'confesses' to Germany murder after Iraq arrest

A picture of Susanna Maria Feldman among flowers at a makeshift memorial. Photo: Boris Roessler /DPA/AFP

Ali Bashar, 20, is believed to have strangled 14-year-old Susanna Maria Feldman after raping her in the German city of Wiesbaden.

He was detained early Friday in northern Iraq following an outcry in Germany after police hunting the fugitive admitted he had fled with his family.

“During interrogation following his arrest, the young man originally from Kurdistan confessed to killing the German girl,” said Tariq Ahmad, police chief for the Dohuk area of Iraqi Kurdistan.

“He said that the two of them were friends but that they had a dispute, and that he killed her when the girl threatened to call the police,” Ahmad said.

On Friday a senior official in the autonomous Kurdistan region told AFP that authorities were working to transfer Bashar quickly back to Germany to face trial.

That process could prove tricky as there is no official extradition treaty between Iraq and Germany.

The case has put renewed pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel's government over the decision to open Germany's borders at the height of Europe's refugee crisis in 2015, resulting in the arrival of more than a million asylum seekers.

Bashar arrived in Germany in 2015 along with his parents and five siblings.

He should have been deported after his request for asylum was rejected in December 2016, but he obtained a temporary residence permit pending his appeal.

During this time, he got into trouble with the police on several occasions, including for fights, alleged robbery and possession of an illegal switchblade.

He was also among the suspects for the sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl living in the same refugee shelter.

Alps murders: Police probe Romanian link

Flowers placed at the scene near Chevaline in the French Alps where the British Iraqi family were gunned down along with a French cyclist. Photo: AFP

Police probing the murder of a British-Iraqi family in the French Alps last year are looking into telephone calls to Romania made from the phone of the brother of one of the victims, the prosecutor in charge of the investigation said Monday.

Annecy Prosecutor Eric Maillaud said Romanian authorities had been asked to help establish who Zaid al-Hilli, the brother of Saad al-Hilli, had apparently been calling but they had not been able to identify the numbers.

"There were calls made from the phone of Saad al-Hilli's brother to Romania," Maillaud told AFP. "A formal request for assistance was made to Romania several months ago but so far it has not produced anything."

Maillaud stressed that the Romania link was not being treated as a major new lead.

"It is simply that we can leave no stone unturned," he said. "This is part of the masses of data we are gathering month after month.

"We know calls were made to Romania but we do not know who was at the other end of the line or why the calls were made."

Maillaud has in the past mooted the possibility of the shooting having been the work of a "low-cost killer" from eastern Europe, although he has always stressed the lack of any firm evidence to back up that theory.

Maillaud's team believe that Saad al-Hilli was embroiled in a dispute with his brother over a family inheritance which could have provided a motive for the murder.

According to Maillaud, Saad and Zaid's father wrote two draft wills, one of which left Saad with nothing and one which envisaged a fair split of assets
worth several million euros.

Zaid al-Hilli denies any feud with his brother. British police have spoken to him as part of their inquiries but have given no indication that they consider him a suspect.

Maillaud said that, for that reason, Zaid al-Hilli had not been asked to explain the calls from his phone to Romania.

"Those are the type of questions that cannot be asked of a witness in Britain," the prosecutor said. "He would have to be considered a suspect."

Saad al-Hilli, his wife Iqbal and her mother Suhaila al-Allaf were shot dead in the family estate car at a beauty spot near Lake Annecy on September 5th.

Their two young daughters survived the shooting, in which a French cyclist was also slain.

Police believe the cyclist, Sylvain Moller, was not a target and was shot because he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

The attack bore some of the hallmarks of a professional assassination with the victims all having been shot in the head and at close range.

But detectives have admitted to being puzzled as to why the gunman unleashed at least 25 shots, which is incompatible with the idea of him or her being a highly trained professional.

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