The Iraqi government has lodged a protest with Germany and its own Kurdish autonomy over the “illegal” extradition of an Iraqi national suspected of raping and killing a Jewish teenage girl in Wiesbaden in May.
Baghdad has accused Berlin of arranging with Kurdish authorities the transfer to Germany of 20-year-old Ali Bashar who is accused of murdering 14-year-old Susanna Feldmann even before the Iraqi government could process the formal extradition request, Deutsche Welle reported.
Public prosecutors in Wiesbaden deny any transgressions citing specific clauses in German federal policing laws.
According to earlier reports, a team of German law enforcement officers had flown to the Kurdish capital of Erbil to pick up the suspect and bring him back to Germany.
Bashar was detained by police in Duhok on Friday after Germany’s Interior Ministry contacted the Kurdish regional Interior Ministry.
“Gangster, Drug Dealer”
The body of Susanna Feldmann, who went missing on May 22, was later found not far from the refugee home where Ali Bashar lived.
Interviewed by Der Spiegel magazine, Bashar’s fellow residents described him as a gangster and drug dealer who believed that German police would never be able to get him.
The authorities’ failure to apprehend Bashar who was able to leave Germany for his native Iraqi Kurdistan has raised an angry outcry and criticism of the local immigration officials with people wondering how the man was allowed to remain in Germany after his asylum bid had been turned down.
The results of a DNA test are expected to confirm the suspect’s role in Susanna Feldmann’s murder.
READ MORE: Migrants From Iraq, Turkey Suspected of Raping, Murdering Jewish Girl in Germany
Ali Bashar, who has already admitted to killing the teenage girl, remains under heavy guard in Frankfurt.
Bashar arrived in Germany in 2015, at the height of the inflow of refugees and other migrants from North Africa and the Middle East.
He was in the process of appealing the rejection of his asylum application, and police have said he is suspected in a string of previous offenses.
In just the past two years, more than one million refugees — many of them Syrians — have inundated Germany as Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the country’s borders.
Merkel’s open-door policy has been widely criticized, helping propel the anti-migrant Alternative for Germany party to third place in last year’s parliamentary elections.
