(JTA) — An Iraqi man was extradited to Germany after admitting to raping and murdering a Jewish German teenage girl.
Ali Bashar, 20, a former Iraqi asylum seeker, was scheduled to be interrogated by German investigators on Sunday, after arriving back in Germany from Iraq on Saturday.
Bashar fled from Germany after the murder last week, and was discovered in Zakho in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, where he was arrested on Friday night.
The girl, identified by police as Susanna Maria Feldman, was found Wednesday outside Wiesbaden, a city in western Germany. On Thursday, police said two male asylum seekers were detained in connection to her rape and murder. One was later released.
There is no formal extradition treaty between Iraq and Germany. Bashar arrived in Germany in 2015 along with his parents and five siblings, the French news agency AFP reported. His request for asylum had been rejected the following year and he remained in Germany waiting for his appeal, according to reports.
“During interrogation following his arrest, the young man originally from Kurdistan confessed to killing the German girl,” Tariq Ahmad, police chief for the Dohuk province of Iraqi Kurdistan, told reporters, according to AFP. “He said that the two of them were friends but that they had a dispute, and that he killed her when the girl threatened to call the police.”
Police said there was no evidence that religion had been a factor in the violent crime. The Central Council of Jews in Germany in a statement confirmed that Susanna was a member of the Jewish community cautioned against attributing any anti-Semitic motive. The Council wrote that “premature conclusions or speculation [about the case] are out of the question.”
