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.

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