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Kidnappers give up body of 17-year-old victim

Police confirmed on Tuesday that the 17-year-old daughter of a Saxon businessman was found dead near Meißen after being kidnapped and held for ransom last week.

Published: 18 August 2015 16:56 CEST

Kidnappers give up body of 17-year-old victim

A photo of Anneli, who police confirmed had been found dead in a case that has shaken the country. Photo: DPA.

Two men aged 39 and 61 were arrested on Monday as suspects of the crime and faced a court hearing on Tuesday.

Anneli Marie R. went missing on Thursday evening after she was last seen going out for a bicycle ride with her dog, police said.

“All hopes and prayers have not been fulfilled,” said Dresden police chief Dieter Kroll at a press conference on Tuesday. “We express our utmost sympathy and sorrow to the family.”

Police said that two men forced the teen to get into their car on Thursday.

The kidnappers later used her cellphone to call her father, who police said was a businessman well-known in the community, and demanded a ransom of €1.2 million.

Police explained that because of the family's prominence, they believed at least one of the kidnappers knew what she looked like before the crime, from seeing her in town or looking on Facebook.

Police said the perpetrators most likely killed Anneli as a way to conceal their crime, for fear that she would be able to identify them if she were released since they had not worn masks.

Investigators said that she was probably killed as soon as Friday. When the kidnappers called the parents again on that day, the perpetrators refused to offer proof that she was still alive.

Friday was the last that the parents heard from the kidnappers.

Investigators were able on Sunday to identify one of the men, who had a criminal record, through traces of his DNA left on her bicycle discovered after she went missing.

After this finding, officers made the investigation public and the parents wrote an open letter to the kidnappers.

Officers said they also used cell phone-tracking to locate one of the men in Dresden. The second man was arrested in Bamberg, Bavaria. One of the suspects ultimately told investigators the location of her body.

Anneli's cause of death has still not been determined, pending a forensics investigation.

Germany arrests Syrian man accused of plotting to kill soldiers

The suspect, an “alleged follower of a radical Islamic ideology”, was arrested on Thursday on charges of planning “a serious act of violence endangering the state”.

The man had acquired two heavy knives “around 40 centimetres (more than one foot) in length” in recent days, prosecutors in Munich said.

He planned to “attack Bundeswehr soldiers” in the city of Hof in northern Bavaria during their lunch break, aiming “to kill as many of them as possible”, prosecutors said.

“The accused wanted to attract attention and create a feeling of insecurity among the population,” they said.

German security services have been on high alert over the threat of Islamist attacks, in particular since the Gaza war erupted on October 7th with the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Police shot dead a man in Munich this month after he opened fire on officers in what was being treated as a suspected “terrorist attack” on the Israeli consulate in Munich.

The shootout fell on the anniversary of the kidnap and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games by Palestinian militants.

The 18-year-old suspect had previously been investigated by authorities in his home country Austria on suspicion of links to terrorism but the case had been dropped.

The incident capped a string of attacks in Germany, which have stirred a sense of insecurity in Germany and fed a bitter debate of immigration.

Three people were killed last month in a suspected Islamist stabbing at a festival in the western city of Solingen.

READ ALSO: ‘Ban asylum seekers’ – How Germany is reacting to Solingen attack

The suspect in the attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State group, was a Syrian man who had been slated for deportation from Germany.

A federal interior ministry spokesman said if an Islamist motive was confirmed in the latest foiled attack, it would be “further evidence of the high threat posed by Islamist terrorism in Germany, which was recently demonstrated by the serious crimes in Mannheim and the attack in Solingen, but also by acts that were fortunately prevented by the timely intervention of the security authorities”.

The Solingen stabbing followed a knife attack in the city of Mannheim in May, which left a policeman dead, and which had also been linked to Islamism by officials.

Germany has responded to the attacks by taking steps to tighten immigration controls and knife laws.

READ ALSO: Debt, migration and the far-right – the big challenges facing Germany this autumn

The government has announced new checks along all of its borders and promised to speed up deportations of migrants who have no right to stay in Germany.

The number of people considered Islamist extremists in Germany fell slightly from 27,480 in 2022 to 27,200 last year, according to a report from the federal domestic intelligence agency.

But Interior Minister Nancy Faeser warned in August that “the threat posed by Islamist terrorism remains high”.

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