Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

CRIME

Police hunt for murder suspect who left pieces of prostitute’s body around Hamburg

Hamburg may have its own version of 'Jack the Ripper', as police have so far found a new body part almost every day this week belonging to a 48-year-old prostitute.

Published: 11 August 2017 10:40 CEST

Police hunt for murder suspect who left pieces of prostitute's body around Hamburg

Hamburg police searching along the Elbe River after the discovery of body parts. Photo: TNN/DPA.

Police on Thursday said they had found a seventh piece of the body of a 48-year-old prostitute, identified in local media as Lucy.

A police spokeswoman said that they still do not have any “hot” clues to unravel the mystery.

Before she was reported missing on August 1st, she had been working as a prostitute.

Investigators believe that the culprit probably hacked the 48-year-old woman to pieces and distributed the pieces around the harbour city over the waterways. The places where the body parts have been found are located at least 20 kilometres away from each other. DNA tests have proven the parts to all be from the same person.

The first discovery was made by a passerby last week along the shore of the Elbe River, leading police to find yet another body part in the area. Then another passerby found a torso by a canal on Monday evening, followed by further findings by another canal as well as by a watergate.

The map below shared by broadcaster Ntv shows the various locations where the body parts were found.

Lucy was a citizen of Equatorial Guinea in west Africa, but had lived in Spain before coming to Hamburg, according to the Hamburger Morgenpost. Before her death, she had been working in the St. Georg neighbourhood of Hamburg as a sex worker, which is legal in Germany.

Her family in Spain has come to Hamburg amid the investigation, and relatives have been interviewed by investigators.

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”.

SHOW COMMENTS

Url copied to clipboard!