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CRIME

Dismembered woman found in suitcase died of head injury

A woman whose decomposing torso was found this week in a suitcase in the northern German city of Braunschweig died of a head injury, police said on Thursday.

Published: 22 May 2008 14:15 CEST
Dismembered woman found in suitcase died of head injury
A suitcase in a field held the rest of the body. Photo: DPA

The autopsy results match a confession by the 48-year-old woman’s boyfriend, police said. The 42-year-old man, who has been arrested on suspicion of murder, told police he killed the woman in mid-March and cut her body in pieces.

He did not disclose a motive, though both are believed to have been drunk at the time. Both the victim and suspect had problems with alcohol abuse, police said.

“The suspect is no stranger to us,” Braunschweig police spokesman Joachim Grande told German news agency DDP, which reported that the 42-year-old had been the subject of previous harassment and assault complaints.

A janitor found the woman’s badly decomposed torso on Tuesday in the cellar of her apartment house after residents complained about maggots and a terrible smell. Police used search dogs to find the rest of the pieces of her body, which had been hidden in a second suitcase in a field about a kilometre from the apartment house.

Police identified the woman by her tattoos as Karin N., DDP reported. Her last name has not been disclosed.

In his confession, the woman’s boyfriend told police she was lying on a sofa when he struck her on the head. Terrified of being discovered, he said he hacked off her head and legs in the bathroom and hid the pieces of her body in the two suitcases.

dpa/ddp

CRIME

Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.

Published: 5 May 2024 12:52 CEST
Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.

Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.

Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.

Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.

“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.

Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.

Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.

Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.

According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.

A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.

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