BREAKING NEWS: German woman on trial over doppelganger murder

A woman went on trial in Germany on Tuesday for allegedly murdering a lookalike she found on social media to fake her own death.

The German-Iraqi woman and a male accomplice are accused of luring the 23-year-old victim from her home, driving her to a wooded area and killing her with multiple stab wounds.

They then allegedly planted the body in the German-Iraqi woman’s car to make it look as though she was the one who had been killed.

The woman’s defence lawyers on Tuesday requested that the trial be suspended because they had received the documents too late, a spokeswoman for the court in the Bavarian town of Ingolstadt said.

The case first came to light in August 2022 when the body was found.

Police initially said they believed the victim was the owner of the car, but the next day identified her as someone else who looked “remarkably similar”.

The German-Iraqi woman and a Kosovan man, then also both 23, were arrested on suspicion of manslaughter.

However, after further investigations, police said they believed the pair had murdered the victim after tracking her down online.

“Investigators now believe the female suspect wanted to go into hiding and fake her death due to family problems,” they said in a statement in January 2023.

The suspect had contacted several women who looked like her via social media and attempted to lure them into meeting her by making “false promises”, the police said.

She had contacted the victim in early August and arranged to meet her on August 16.

She and the Kosovan man had then travelled to the victim’s home in Heilbronn, near Stuttgart, to pick her up.

On the way back to Ingolstadt, they allegedly lured her out of the vehicle in a wooded area and killed her, inflicting “a large number” of knife wounds.

The suspects then continued on to Ingolstadt, where the body was found in the car in the evening.

According to Der Spiegel magazine, the German-Iraqi woman is a member of the Yazidi community and had recently split from her husband, invoking the ire of her relatives.

She had previously tried to hire a hitman to kill her brother-in-law after he tried to prevent them from separating, the magazine said.

The suspect had an Instagram account which she used to share “beauty, fashion and make-up tips” and often appeared in “tight, glittering dresses”, according to Der Spiegel.

She reportedly entrapped the victim by offering her a free beauty treatment.

The suspect and the victim both had “long, dark hair and a dark complexion”, Der Spiegel said.