The Mannheim public prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday, September 2, the indictment of two forty-year-olds, accused of having killed a Ukrainian refugee, as well as her mother, in early March, with the aim of taking the child of the former, born five weeks earlier.
It is a macabre and incredible affair that is shaking the southwest of Germany: the double murder of Hockenheim. It is near this city in the state of Baden-Württemberg, famous for its Formula 1 circuit, that two Ukrainian refugees disappeared at the beginning of March. A young woman of 27, who had given birth five weeks earlier to a little girl, and her own mother, aged 51. The lifeless body of the first was spotted by a passer-by on the banks of the Rhine, on March 7, the day after the mysterious disappearance. Twelve days later, police divers found the second body in the waters of the river.
On Tuesday, September 2, the Mannheim public prosecutor’s office announced in a press release the indictment of a couple in their forties from the neighboring town of Sandhausen, accused of the two murders and the kidnapping of the infant. The suspects, aged 43 and 44, were arrested on March 13 and have been in pretrial detention since. Their motive? According to the public prosecutor’s office, 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“With this in mind, the woman, originally from Russia, joined a Telegram group supporting Ukrainian refugees and contacted a pregnant woman about to give birth who was looking for an interpreter for the birth of her daughter.
Carefully considered project
At the beginning of March, during a meeting in a restaurant, the suspects discreetly administered sedatives to the victims. Then they took advantage of their weakened state to carry out their plan of death. When the grandmother declared that she felt unwell, the man offered to take her to the hospital. But he actually drove her to the banks of the Rhine, where he hit her several times with an object that had not yet been identified before pushing her into the water. According to the autopsy, she died from her head injuries. The couple then returned, told the young Ukrainian woman that her mother had been hospitalized for a heart attack and took her in turn by car, with her child. Direction Hockenheim, near a dam, where the young woman was also murdered, and her body burned. Their misdeed accomplished, the suspects returned home with the child, who was found, unharmed, at the time of the arrest.
The plan to kidnap the little girl seems to have been carefully considered. According to information from the daily newspaper Bildthe suspects went so far as to declare the birth of a child to the registry office in early February and to request a birth certificate. To his colleagues, the man, who worked in a butcher’s shop, had rejoiced at his alleged paternity, but had explained that the baby was still in intensive care. Lies. The real little girl, now motherless, was entrusted to child protection, then to her aunt. The deceased’s sister returned to Ukraine to raise the child, whom she allegedly intended to adopt.
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