A German woman has been accused of looking for a doppelgänger on Instagram and then killing the woman while trying to fake her own death.
An extraordinary incident, called the “double homicide” by the German media, took place in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt.
A German-Iraqi woman, identified by police as 24-year-old Shahraban K., who lives in Munich, allegedly created fake Instagram accounts and tried to arrange meetings with women who looked like her.
She eventually found a beauty blogger, Algerian Khadija Oh, 23, who lived about 100 miles from Algiers, police said.
Both women had long dark hair and similar complexions.
Then Shahraban K. and her boyfriend from Kosovo named Shekir K., 24, allegedly made an offer for beauty products and went after her.
On the way back, they stopped in the woods and stabbed the victim more than 50 times, according to German police.
Shahraban K. told her family that she was going to Ingolstadt to meet her ex-husband.
When she did not return, her parents went looking for her in Ingolstadt and found her Mercedes near the Danube.
In the back seat lay the body of a dark-haired young woman who had been brutally murdered, and they believed it to be their daughter.
Several knives were reportedly found nearby, and a vehicle was found near Shekir K’s apartment.
However, after an autopsy and DNA analysis, it turned out that the body actually belonged to Khadija O.
Then Shahraban K. and Shekir K. were arrested.
The body was found and the victim’s true identity was established in August.
But at first the police were puzzled by the similarity between the owner of the car and the dead woman found in it.
As part of the subsequent investigation, they examined Shahraban K.’s use of social media.
Veronika Grieser, prosecutor of Ingolstadt, told the Bild newspaper: “It is confirmed that the defendant contacted via Instagram several women who seemed to resemble her.
“It can be assumed that the suspect wanted to go into hiding due to internal disagreements with her family and fake her own death.”
A police spokesman said the murder was carried out for “base motives.”
The spokesman said: “On the way back, the victim was lured out of the car, as planned, under pretext and killed in a forested area with a large number of stab wounds in the body.
“Then the accused continued on their way to Ingolstadt, where the body was found on the evening of 16 August. They found him lying in the car.”
Another police spokesman told Bild: “The murder weapon has yet to be found, but the burden of proof is overwhelming.
“The victim was killed with more than 50 stab wounds, her face was badly damaged. It was brutal in the extreme.
“It was an extraordinary case that required all the skills of the investigators. It’s not every day that something like this happens, especially with such a spectacular twist. The day we found the body, we didn’t expect it to develop in this way.”
Bild reports that there were no comments from Shahraban K. or Shekir K., who could face life imprisonment if found guilty.
