The alleged perpetrator — identified only as 23-year-old Sharaban K. — killed beauty blogger Khadidja O., also 23, in Ingolstadt, Germany last August, according to investigators.
Khadidja O. had been brutally stabbed more than 50 times, with her body left on the back seat of Sharaban K.’s Mercedes. Sharaban K. and an accomplice — identified as her boyfriend Sheqir K.— subsequently went into hiding.
This week, police charged Sharaban K. with murder, with prosecutors saying she trawled Instagram in a bid to find a victim who matched her physical appearance.
“It has been confirmed that the accused had contacted several women via Instagram before the act who seemed to look similar to her,” Attorney General Veronika Grieser told local publication, Bild. “It can be assumed that the suspect wanted to go into hiding, due to internal disputes with her family, and fake her own death.”
When the body was found, police traced the car’s registration to Sharaban K.’s family. Given the corpse had been disfigured, investigators assumed that she was the victim.
However, a subsequent autopsy report uncovered that the actual victim was Khadidja O., prompting an investigation into the bizarre case dubbed “the doppelganger murder” by German media.
The mystery began last Aug. 16, when the body of a woman who had been stabbed to death was found by the parents of the 23-year-old German-Iraqi female in her parked vehicle in Ingolstadt, according to a statement from police in upper Bavaria north.
But a subsequent autopsy “raised serious doubts about the identity of the woman,” they said in a statement two days later.
According to the daily Sueddeustche Zeitung, the German-Iraqi was a beautician who entrapped the victim via Instagram by offering her cosmetics.
Both women had "long brown hair, a dark complexion and a heavily made-up face," the newspaper said.
Arrest warrants on suspicion of murder have now been issued for the woman and her friend, police in the southern city of Ingolstadt, around 50 miles north of the regional capital, Munich, announced Monday. The pair have been in custody since days after the body was discovered.
"I can confirm that the accused 23-year-old female obviously planned to start a new life due to family problems," police spokesperson Andreas Aichele told NBC News. She had set up several social media accounts "to find any persons looking as similar to her as possible,"Aichele said.
"Investigations revealed contact to several young ladies during a period of few weeks. Investigators assume that under a pretext she managed to organize a meeting with the later victim. Together with the 23-year-old male she traveled to the Heilbronn region to pick her up and carry out the planned murder," Aichele added.
It brought relief to the father of the 23-year-old, but not under the circumstances he expected. “The police came to us ... and said, ‘Good news, your daughter is alive.’ We were so happy. We thought she was dead,” German newspaper Bild quoted the woman's father as saying.
Instead, two days later, police said they had arrested the woman and another 23-year-old of Kosovan descent under suspicion of manslaughter. The two suspects have been in custody since, and the arrest warrants on suspicion of murder were issued late last week.
The dead woman, it turns out, was another 23-year-old woman who police said "looked strikingly similar" to the suspect. “She offered them various benefits in order to achieve a meeting. However, it did not come to a meeting with those women,” prosecutor Dr. Veronika Grieser said.
According to the Bavarian police, the main suspect contacted the victim through social media in early August and arranged a meeting on Aug. 16. She traveled with her friend in her car to the greater Heilbronn area, around 150 miles west of Ingolstadt, to pick up the victim at home, police said.
She 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 contacted the victim in early August and arranged to meet her on August 16.
The German-Iraqi woman and the Kosovan man 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 lying in the car in the evening.
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