Iraqi faces German court in ‘Susanna’ rape-murder case
BERLIN: An Iraqi man goes on trial in Germany yesterday accused of the rape and murder of a teenage girl that inflamed anti-immigrant tensions amid a mass influx of asylum seekers.
The accused, Ali Bashar, 22, left Germany for northern Iraq shortly after the May 2018 crime but was brought back in a mission joined personally by federal police chief Dieter Romann.
Bashar’s trial for the rapemurder of 14-year- old schoolgirl Susanna Maria Feldman will start under tight security at 0830 GMT in the city of Wiesbaden.
To Germany’s far right, the alleged killer, who is also accused of raping an 11-year- old girl in a separate case, has become a symbol of the threat allegedly posed by the wave of newcomers.
Before the trial, the anti-Islam Alternative for Germany (AfD) party again blamed Chancellor Angela Merkel and her grand coalition or ‘GroKo’ government for Susanna’s death.
“The problem isn’t ‘the right’ but the knife-man immigration caused by the GroKo that has caused ever more bloody crimes,” the party wrote in a Facebook post. The AfD became the biggest opposition party when it entered parliament in late 2017, riding a wave of public anger over sexual assaults and other violent crimes committed by some recent migrants.
In another case last year, the fatal stabbing of a German man in the eastern city of Chemnitz, allegedly by immigrants, sparked outbursts of mob violence in which far-right extremists hunted people of foreign appearance through the streets.
Bashar, along with his parents and five siblings, first arrived in Germany in 2015, the year that saw the peak of the migrant influx which would bring more than one million people to Europe’s top economy.
His request for asylum was rejected in December 2016, but – in a case critics label as symptomatic of an overwhelmed and dysfunctional system – he obtained a temporary residence permit pending his appeal. — AFP