A woman has been detained by German police on suspicion of killing a doppelgänger she found online in order to fake her own demise.
According to Ingolstadt police spokesperson Andreas Aichele, the 23-year-old German-Iraqi woman is being held at a prison in southern Germany’s Ingolstadt in connection with the death of a 23-year-old Algerian woman.
In connection with the murder, a 23-year-old Kosovan male is also in police custody.
The German-Iraqi suspect’s parents filed a missing person’s report for her on August 16 of last year. Later, a woman’s body was discovered inside her vehicle in Ingolstadt. She had many stab wounds, and her face was disfigured.
The body was immediately identified as that of the missing woman by police and her parents. However, an autopsy and DNA examination proved that it was actually another woman who was “strikingly similar” to her but was not her. Later, it was discovered that the victim was a 23-year-old Algerian lady.
Police say they tracked the German-Iraqi woman to the Kosovan man’s flat on August 18 and made an arrest.
“Investigators now assume that the suspect wanted to go into hiding due to family problems and faked her death,” Andreas Aichele told reporters.
“The suspects came up with the plan to search online for a woman who looked similar to the German-Iraqi, kill her, and place her in such a way that the corpse would be mistaken for the suspect.”
According to Aichele, the German-Iraqi woman, a beauty influencer on Instagram, looked online for women who looked like her and tried to “persuade them with false promises to meet her.”
The Ingolstadt district court issued murder arrest warrants for both suspects on January 26 and 27, according to Aichele.
The two suspects are being imprisoned in separate jails and cannot be named by the police due to German privacy laws.
Author-Roberta Appiah
