A German couple is accused of killing the mother and grandmother of a Ukrainian baby they wanted to abduct for adoption.
A double murder with a sordid motive. A couple from southern Germany have been charged with killing two Ukrainian refugees, the mother and grandmother of a baby whom the suspects abducted with the aim of taking the child for themselves, the prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday, September 3.
The 43-year-old man and the 44-year-old woman were arrested in March, a week after the incident, the Mannheim (south) public prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
The couple are being prosecuted for drugging a 27-year-old woman and her 51-year-old mother before murdering them and taking the weeks-old baby.
“Unfulfilled desire” to have a child
The couple “had long harbored an unfulfilled desire to have a daughter together” and planned to “kidnap a baby and pass it off as their own child,” the prosecutor’s statement said.
The woman infiltrated a Telegram group supporting Ukrainian refugees and in January made contact with a 27-year-old pregnant woman who was about to give birth and was looking for an interpreter for the birth of her daughter.
In early March, the couple invited the family to a restaurant and administered sedatives without their knowledge. According to investigators, the suspects first isolated the grandmother, who was sick from the medication, by pretending to take her to the hospital. They actually drove her to a lake “where the husband allegedly hit the victim’s head at least four times with an unknown object” before throwing her into the water.
The 27-year-old woman and her baby were then taken to Hockenheim, near the Rhine, and the man hit the mother on the head “at least three times” before burning her body.
The suspects returned home with the baby but were arrested after the discovery of the young woman’s body. The girl, who was five weeks old at the time of the arrest, was taken into child protection care unharmed.
