CNN
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German police have arrested a woman accused of killing a woman doppelgänger He searched online to fake his death.
A 23-year-old German-Iraqi woman is being held at a prison in Ingolstadt, southern Germany, in connection with the death of a 23-year-old Algerian woman, Ingolstadt police spokesman Andreas Eichel told CNN on Tuesday. A 23-year-old Kosovan man is also in custody in connection with the murder.
The parents of the German-Iraqi suspect reported him missing on August 16 last year. His car was later found in Ingolstadt along with the body of a woman. He had been stabbed multiple times and his face was disfigured.
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 a different woman who looked “strikingly similar” to him. The victim was later identified as a 23-year-old Algerian woman.
According to police, the German-Iraqi woman was arrested on 18 August after tracking her to the Kosovan man’s apartment.
Eichel told CNN, “Investigators now believe the suspect went into hiding due to family problems and staged a fake death.”
“The suspects came up with a plan to search for a German-Iraqi-looking woman online, kill her, and place her in such a way that the corpse would be mistaken for a suspect.”
The German-Iraqi woman, who was a beauty blogger and Instagram influencer, searched online for women who looked like her and tried to “persuade them with false promises of meeting her,” according to Eichel.
Eichel said that on January 26 and 27, the Ingolstadt district court had issued arrest warrants for murder for both suspects.
The police have questioned several women whom it had contacted as part of its investigation. The two suspects, who cannot be named by police under German privacy laws, are being held in separate prisons.