CNN
—
German police have arrested a woman on suspicion of murdering a doppelganger she sought online to fake her own death.
A 23-year-old German Iraqi woman is being held in prison in southern Germany’s Ingolstadt in connection with the death of a 23-year-old Algerian woman, Ingolstadt police spokesman Andreas Eichelle said on Tuesday. A 23-year-old Kosovar man has also been detained in connection with the murder, he told CNN.
The German-Iraqi suspect’s parents reported her missing on August 16 last year. Her car was later found in Ingolstadt with the body of a woman. She had been stabbed multiple times and her face was distorted.
Police and her parents initially identified the body as that of the missing woman. However, an autopsy and DNA analysis revealed that it was not her, but another woman who had a “startling resemblance” to her. I was.
The German-Iraqi woman was arrested on August 18 after police tracked her to a Kosovar man’s apartment, police said.
“Investigators are now speculating that the suspect wanted to go into hiding due to family issues and faked her death,” Aichele told CNN.
“The suspect came up with a plan to search online for a woman who looked like a German-Iraqi, murder her, and place her in such a way that the corpse could be mistaken for the suspect.”
The German-Iraqi woman, a beauty blogger and Instagram influencer, said she searched online for women who looked like her and tried to “faithfully convince them to meet.”
On January 26 and 27, the Ingolstadt district court issued murder arrest warrants for both suspects, Aichele said.
Police are interviewing several women she contacted as part of the investigation. The two suspects, whose names cannot be determined by police according to German privacy laws, are being held in separate prisons.
