On Wednesday, an Iraqi man was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a teenage girl in Germany.
Ali Bashar, the 22-year-old Iraqi national, admitted he strangled Susanna Feldman back in 2018. However, he denied the rape charges against him and claimed he did not know how it all happened. However, judges in the German city of Wiesbaden found him guilty of both the rape and murder of the 14-year-old girl.
The presiding judge on the case, Jürgen Bonk, said the defendant acted "in cold blood," as reported by DW.
Getting granted parole after 15 years, a commonality in Germany, is highly unlikely in Bashar's case due to a "particular severity of guilt," a local news site reported.
Bashar is believed to have arrived in Germany in 2015; his request for asylum in the country was rejected the following year. He appealed the decision and obtained a temporary residency permit meanwhile.
According to the BBC, prosecutors said Bashar had raped the victim in a wooded area and then strangled her to death when she threatened to report him to the police. He then used her phone to send out a message to her mother in an attempt to make her believe Feldman had left for Paris.
Her body was found two weeks after the murder took place after police received a tip from an Afghan boy from Bashar's shelter. By the time her body was found, Bashar had returned to northern Iraq with his family.
Feldman's mother said the police did nothing for five days when she reported her daughter missing.
Iraq and Germany do not have an extradition treaty, an agreement between countries where one jurisdiction delivers a person accused of committing a crime in another jurisdiction. So, the head of Germany's federal police, Dieter Romann, traveled to Irbil to bring him back to the European country, according to the BBC.
In a separate trial, Bashar has been accused of raping an 11-year-old girl twice in Germany.
To Germany's far-right, Bashar's case can be used as evidence to claim that Chancellor Angela Merkel's government had lost control over the refugees who came into the country.