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AFP/Getty Images
Flowers marked the spot where Susanna’s body was found last June
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.
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EPA
Ali Bashar covered his face at the start of the trial
Prosecutors said he had raped Susanna Feldman in a wooded area near a railway line, then strangled her from behind when she threatened to go police. He then used the schoolgirl’s phone to send messages that she had decided to travel to Paris, they said.
What defendant said
Bashar denied raping Susanna and claimed that they had consensual sex.
During the trial, he described through an interpreter how his family had fled Iraq in 2015.
He then talked about his time in Germany, and how – despite consuming alcohol from the age of 12 – it was there that he was first introduced to harder drugs.
He claimed that he had met Susanna through a mutual acquaintance three months before the attack and had spent time with her, listening to music and walking with her, hand in hand. He had not known her age, he said.
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Speaking of the incident, Ali Bashar told the court: “Everything went black before my eyes, then it all happened. I don’t know how it could have happened.”
How Bashar was caught
On 6 June 2018, Susanna Feldman’s body was found in a shallow grave covered with leaves, twigs and soil after police were given information from a 13-year-old Afghan boy from Bashar’s asylum shelter.
By the time she had been found, Bashar and his family had travelled to the Kurdish city of Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, where he was then detained by local forces.
As Iraq and Germany do not have an extradition treaty, a high-profile mission began involving the head of German federal police, Dieter Romann, who travelled to Irbil with anti-terror police to bring him back.
The case has provoked widespread anger politically. Police were criticised after the teenager’s disappearance for failing to carry out a sufficient search.
Mrs Merkel said during a TV interview at the time of Bashar’s arrest that the case showed how important it was for people with no residency status to be put before the courts so that “they can quickly get sent home again”.
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AFP
Bashar was brought back to Germany in an operation led by the head of German federal police
Politicians from Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party were accused of seizing on the case for political ends. Marches and vigils were held against illegal immigration, three years after a wave of migrants and refugees arrived in Germany.
Several high-profile crimes involving asylum seekers have sparked public anger in Germany. The killing of a 15-year-old German girl in the south west of Germany by her ex-boyfriend was also seized upon by far-right groups.
There were clashes last August after a man was fatally stabbed in the eastern city of Chemnitz. An Iraqi and a Syrian were arrested at the time.