A 44-year-old Sudanese migrant was arrested this week in the German town of Helmstedt in connection with the rape and murder of a 63-year-old homeless woman whose body was found last week.
The body of 63-year-old Susanne M. was found by police last week at a playground in the Lower Saxony capital of Hanover, with investigators also suspecting she had been raped as well, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung reports.
Both the victim and the alleged attacker are said to have been part of the homeless scene in Hanover and also allegedly knew each other for some time prior to the murder.
Senior prosecutor Thomas Klinge claimed that the Sudanese asylum seeker, who had lived under five different identities in Germany and was allegedly looking to purchase another one before the murder, admitted to killing the woman but claimed that he had no intention to kill her at the time.
Police were able to track down the Sudanese asylum seeker with DNA evidence found on the scene which matched in their database, as the man had been recently convicted of a sex crime and given a three-month suspended sentence.
The attack is not the first by a migrant on a poor, older woman in Germany. Last August, a group of migrants from Eritrea allegedly lured a 56-year-old woman who was out gathering bottles to a local school in Dessau where they then proceeded to take turns raping her in such a brutal fashion that the woman spent several days in the hospital following the attack.
In neighbouring France, an Algerian migrant was accused of murdering a 45-year-old homeless Romanian man in the city of Montpellier in March of this year. Police arrested the illegal migrant after finding him wearing the shoes of the victim.
The Algerian told police he had taken the shoes some three hours after already finding the man dead, from apparent blunt force trauma, but could not explain why his blood was also at the scene.