A failed Iraqi asylum seeker has been handed life in prison for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old German girl.
Ali Bashar, 22, had admitted in court in Wiesbaden that he strangled Susanna Feldman on 23 May 2018, but claimed he did not know how it happened.
Her body was found two weeks later, after he had returned to northern Iraq.
The killing prompted outrage in Germany and led Chancellor Angela Merkel to call for faster deportation of failed asylum seekers in the country.
Bashar was sentenced on Wednesday amid tight security at the court in Wiesbaden, the city where the murder took place.
As his crime was deemed by the judge to be of exceptional severity, he is unlikely to be granted parole after 15 years.
Susanna’s mother, Diana, said that “part of my future and my heart disappeared” when her daughter died.
“I have already received life imprisonment, although I am not guilty. I will never get a chance for a pardon,” she wrote in a six-page letter to Bashar ahead of the verdict, German newspaper Bild reported (in German).
Prosecutors said Bashar had raped Susanna Feldman in a wooded area near a railway line, then strangled her from behind when she threatened to go to police. He then used the schoolgirl’s phone to send messages that she had decided to travel to Paris, they said.
Bashar denied raping Susanna and claimed that they had consensual sex.
Source: BBC
