A 24-year-old German-Iraqi woman has been on trial in Germany since Tuesday for the murder of her “double”, a young woman who lured her into a trap via social networks in order to fake her own disappearance and restart her life.
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The trial of the “doppelganger murderer,” as some German media dubbed him, opened at the court in Ingolstadt in the south to shed light on the August 2022 discovery of the riddled body of a 23-year-old beautician.
According to the prosecutor's office, she was the victim of an intrigue by the defendant, who, plagued by family problems, looked for a woman similar to her on Instagram in order to kill her and make people believe in her own death.
The defendant, now 24, made contact with several potential targets before the attack and offered them a meeting under various pretexts, the Bavarian police said at a press conference on this case.
Ultimately it was a beautician, also based in southern Germany, who agreed to the meeting.
The defendant, who gave advice on fashion and make-up on social networks, is said to have promised her a free treatment in a cosmetic studio.
According to the prosecution, the German-Iraqi woman and an accomplice drove the victim into a wooded area and killed her with numerous stab wounds. They then allegedly placed the body in the defendant's car to support the idea of her death.
According to an investigator quoted by the press, the victim looked “unmistakably” like the suspect, with long brown hair, a dark complexion and a heavily made-up face.
So much so that her own family claimed to have recognized her when the body was found in the vehicle.
On Tuesday, lawyers for the defendants, who were in court with their alleged accomplice, requested a stay of the trial on the grounds that they had received parts of the file too late, a spokesman for the Ingolstadt court said.
According to Der Spiegel, the defendant is a member of the Yazidi community and had separated from her husband before the events, which aroused the anger of her relatives. She previously tried to hire a hitman to murder her brother-in-law after he tried to prevent their separation, this magazine claims.