The body of a 28-year-old female hitchhiker from Germany has been found in Spain following the arrest of a Moroccan truck driver believed to have been involved in her murder.
German Sophia Lösche went missing on the 14th of June after she got in a truck while attempting to hitchhike from Leipzig to Amberg in Bavaria, according to investigators. Her body was found Thursday evening near a petrol station just outside the Spanish city of Bilbao, Bavarian tabloid Tz reports.
Earlier this week, police arrested a 40-year-old truck driver in Spain in connection with the young woman’s disappearance who some in the German media claimed was a Moroccan national.
The finding of the woman’s body came after the 40-year-old allegedly admitted to placing her body near a petrol station. The body was said to have evidence of violence and burn marks when police discovered it.
News soon emerged that Lösche had previously been involved with volunteering for a pro-open borders activist group in Greece where she helped with a project called “No borders kitchen” on the island of Lesbos.
Her brother Andreas Lösche, a member of the Green party and a local politician in the Bavarian city of Bamberg, wrote after the arrest of the 40-year-old trucker: “”
The 51-year-old politician claimed that right-wing “racists” and others were using the disappearance of his sister for political gain and that he had received death threats as a result of his comments saying: “Already, some of us are getting hate comments right through to death threats from right-wing people.”
The killing is not the first time a pro-migrant activist has been allegedly murdered by a foreign national in Germany. In December 2016, 19-year-old Maria Ladenburger was raped and murdered by Afghan asylum seeker Hussein Khavari who claimed to be underage but was later revealed to be an adult. He was given a life sentence for the murder in March 2018.