Germany’s Migrant Rape Crisis: “Failure of the State”

The rape and murder of a 14-year-old Jewish girl by a failed Iraqi asylum seeker has cast a renewed spotlight on Germany’s migrant rape crisis, which has continued unabated for years amid official complicity and public apathy.

Thousands of women and children have been raped or sexually assaulted in Germany since Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed into the country more than one million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

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Police say that Ali Bashar, a 20-year-old Iraqi Kurd, raped Susanna Maria Feldman, strangled her and then dumped her body in a wooded area alongside railroad tracks on the outskirts of Wiesbaden. Bashar then fled to Iraq on false identity papers.

Feldman had been missing from her home in Mainz since May 22. Her mother filed a missing person report on May 23. Police, however, did not even begin to search for the girl until more than a week later, when an unnamed 13-year-old boy, a migrant living in the same refugee shelter as Bashar, contacted the police. Feldman’s body was finally recovered on June 6.

Bashar arrived in Germany in October 2015, at the height of the migrant influx, along with his parents and five siblings; claiming to be refugees, they turned out to be economic migrants. Bashar’s asylum request was rejected in December 2016. He should have been deported, but after he filed an appeal, German authorities allowed him to stay.

During his three years in Germany, Bashar chalked up an extensive criminal record, including physical assault of law enforcement officers, violent robbery at knifepoint and possession of illegal weapons.

Police said that Bashar was also a suspect in the March 2018 rape of an 11-year-old girl living in the same refugee shelter where he and his family were staying.

Bashar was able to flee Germany under a false identity because of bureaucratic incompetence: federal border police failed to check if the name on his plane ticket matched the name on his identity papers.

Bashar was arrested in northern Iraq on June 8 and was extradited to Germany a day later. He is currently being held at a correctional facility in Wiesbaden.

Susanna’s murder was the fourth German teenager to be murdered by illegal migrants during the past 18 months.

• October 16, 2016. Maria Ladenburger, a 19-year-old medical student from Freiburg, was raped and murdered after returning home from a party hosted by her school’s medical faculty. Her attacker was Hussein Khavari, who entered Germany in November 2015 without identification papers. He claimed to have been born in Afghanistan in November 1999. Because of his alleged age (16), he was granted asylum as an underage unaccompanied migrant and placed with a foster family.

After Khavari was arrested as a suspect in the Ladenburger case, the newsmagazine Stern reported that in February 2014, Khavari had been sentenced to ten years in prison for attempted murder for pushing a 20-year-old woman over a cliff on the Greek island of Corfu. The woman survived the attack and Khavari was released after serving 18 months in prison, based on an amnesty for juvenile offenders. He then migrated to Germany.

During his trial in Greece, Khavari told the court that he had been born in Iran in January 1996 and had arrived in Europe in January 2013.

During his trial in Germany, Khavari confessed to raping and killing Ladenburger. It emerged that Khavari was born in Iran on January 29, 1984 and that at the time he killed Ladenburger, he was actually 32. On March 22, 2018, Khavari was sentenced to life in prison for rape and murder, but according to German law, he may apply for parole after serving 15 years.

• December 27, 2017. Mia Valentin, a 15-year-old girl from Kandel, a small town in the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate, near the German border with France, was stabbed to death at a local drugstore. Her attacker was Abdul Mobin, a failed Afghan asylum seeker who claimed to be 15 years old.

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Mobin had arrived in Germany in April 2016 and initially resided at a refugee shelter in Frankfurt. He was later transferred to a refugee shelter in Germersheim {snip}. His asylum claim was rejected in February 2017, but he was not deported. Mobin, who was known to police after he punched a student at Valentin’s school, is being held in custody while German authorities try to determine his true age.

• March 12, 2018. Mireille Bold, a 17-year-old girl from Flensburg, was stabbed to death by Ahmad Gulbhar, an 18-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan. He allegedly became enraged and killed her after she refused to wear a headscarf convert to Islam. Gulbhar had arrived in Germany in 2015 as an underage unaccompanied migrant. His asylum application was rejected but he was never deported.

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The leader of the Free Democrats (FDP), Christian Lindner, said that the crime raises many questions: “Why are rejected asylum seekers not deported more consistently? Why could the perpetrator and his family flee under a false identity?”

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“The Federal Interior Minister must ensure that the existing control mechanisms are also used during entry and exit,” said Burkhard Lischka, an SPD spokesman. “With such questionable papers and in view of the destination, the Federal Police could have determined with a simple fingerprint comparison that a criminal is on the run.”

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