A German-Iraqi woman killed a lookalike she found on social media to fake her own death, police said as new details emerged about a strange case first uncovered last year.
The body of a 23-year-old woman was found in a car in August in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt with multiple stab wounds.
Police initially said they believed the victim owned the car, but the next day identified him as another man who looked “very similar”.
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A 23-year-old German-Iraqi man and a 23-year-old Kosovar man were arrested on suspicion of murder.
However, police are now working on the theory that the pair killed the victim after tracking him down online because he looked similar to the German-Iraqi man.
“Investigatorsnow believe that the female suspect wanted to hide and fake her death due to family issues,” he said in a statement Monday.
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He had contacted several women who looked like him through social media and tried to lure them into meeting him by making “false promises”, police said.
He contacted the victim in early August and arranged to meet her on August 16.
A German-Iraqi woman and a Kosovar man went to the victim’s home in Heilbronn, near Stuttgart, to pick him up.
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On the way back to Ingolstadt, they allegedly lured him out of the vehicle in a wooded area and killed him, inflicting “a large number” of knife wounds.
The suspects then proceeded to Ingolstadt, where the body was found in the car in the evening.
According to the Sueddeustche Zeitung daily, the German-Iraqi man is a beautician who lures victims through Instagram by offering them cosmetics.
Both women have “long brown hair, dark skin and large faces”, the newspaper said.