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Police hunt Iraqi asylum seeker over rape-murder of teenage girl

Authorities in Wiesbaden have detained a man on suspicion of raping and murdering a teenage girl. A second suspect is believed to have fled to Iraq.

Published: 7 June 2018 15:23 CEST
Police hunt Iraqi asylum seeker over rape-murder of teenage girl
Photo: DPA

Police confirmed on Thursday that a body discovered the previous day in scrub land outside the state capital of Hesse belonged to 14-year-old Susanna F.

The teenager had been missing since May 22nd when she never turned up at home after meeting friends in the Wiesbaden town centre.

Several witness statements indicated that Susanna F. had been the victim of a crime.

Achim Thoma, the lead prosecutor in the case, said that Susanna had been strangled to death and that there was evidence she had been raped.

Police have detained a 35-year-old asylum seeker with Turkish citizenship on the suspicion that he was involved in the brutal crime. The other suspect, a 20-year-old from Iraqi, is believed to have fled back to his home country with his entire family. According, to Die Welt, the family used two different sets of identity papers to return home via Istanbul airport.

The breakthrough in the case came when a 13-year-old asylum seeker provided evidence to the police. It is not clear what relationship he had to the two suspects.

A photograph of the suspect, a 20-year-old from Iraq. Photo: DPA

The Iraqi family are believed to have entered Germany during the refugee wave of late 2015.

Several brutal rapes and murders have raised debate in Germany about whether the mass arrivals of refugees in 2015 and 2016 has made the country more dangerous for women.

Earlier this year a refugee from Afghanistan was found guilty of raping and murdering a student in Freiburg. Meanwhile two Afghan youths are awaiting trial in separate cases over the stabbing to death of teenage girls.

In Munich, the trial started in March of a Turkish asylum seeker charged with raping and assaulting a jogger in the city’s English Garden park.

While the far-right Alternative for Germany claim the crimes are evidence that Germany should not be taking in immigrants from Muslim societies, liberal groups have said that the crimes should not be used to cast suspicion on entire ethnic and religious groups.

SEE ALSO: String of knife attacks further fuels debate over refugees and violence

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CRIME

German far-right politician back in court over Nazi slogan

Controversial German far-right politician Björn Höcke went on trial Monday over a banned Nazi slogan that has already earned him a conviction.

Published: 24 June 2024 11:15 CEST
German far-right politician back in court over Nazi slogan

Höcke, a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), was fined €13,000 in May for knowingly using the phrase “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany) at a 2021 campaign rally.

A motto of the Sturmabteilung paramilitary group that played a key role in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the phrase is illegal in Germany, along with the Nazi salute and other slogans and symbols from that era.

Höcke, a former high school history teacher, claimed he was unaware of the slogan’s Nazi past but judges in Halle agreed with prosecutors that he fully understood what he was saying.

The same court will now have to decide whether Höcke, the leader of the AfD in the eastern region of Thuringia, is guilty of knowingly using the slogan a second time at a party gathering in his home state in December 2023.

Höcke had called out the phrase “everything for” and allegedly incited the crowd to reply “Germany”.

If convicted, he could face a fine or up to three years in jail, according to German media. A verdict could come as early as this week.

Considered an extremist by German intelligence services, Hoecke has long courted controversy.

He once called Berlin’s Holocaust monument a “memorial of shame” and has urged a “180-degree shift” in the country’s culture of remembrance.

But the scandals haven’t dented his popularity, and Hoecke is gunning to become Germany’s first far-right state premier when Thuringia holds regional elections in September.

READ ALSO: Germany’s far-right AfD sees strong gains in local eastern elections

The anti-Islam, anti-immigration AfD is currently polling in first place in Thuringia. The party is also expected to perform strongly in two other regional elections in eastern Germany in September.

But in a country where coalition governments are the norm, Germany’s mainstream parties have consistently ruled out cooperating with the AfD.

The AfD scored a record 16 percent in the European Parliament elections earlier this month, outperforming Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party.

READ ALSO: What the EU elections say about the state of politics in Germany

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