The case has caused an angry uproar in Germany, with the Central Council of Jews in Germany making a statement to show sympathy for the victim.
“A young life has been cruelly cut short. Our deepest sympathy goes to her relatives and friends,” the council’s president, Josef Schuster, said in a media statement released on June 7.
”If someone abuses his privilege to remain in Germany as a guest, the consequences for his right of residence must be examined and the full force of the law applied,” he emphasized.
Susanne Schroter, director of the Global Islam Research Center at Goethe University in Frankfurt, said that “there are no young women here” for migrants like Ali Bashar, young, single men, frustrated and aimless.
“Many of these men believe that any woman who is not wearing a headscarf, who shows a bit of skin in the summertime, who drinks alcohol and smokes, is a ’slut’,” she added.
A legislator from the right-wing Alternative for Germany party held a minute of silence for Susanna in the Bundestag on Friday and on Sunday, and two opposing rallies were held in Mainz with the participating political opponents coming together in an outpouring of sympathy for the murdered schoolgirl.
Elio Adler, the Berlin-based founder of the Jewish nonpartisan political group Values Initiative, said that initial speculation about the crime’s possible anti-Semitic motivations have been quickly put to rest.
Ali Bashar arrived in Germany in 2015, at the height of the inflow of refugees and other migrants from North Africa and the Middle East.
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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 1 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 election.