A 37-year-old Afghan asylum seeker was arrested after stabbing his estranged wife to death on a public bus in the German municipality of Obergünzburg on Monday.
Several others on the bus witnessed the attack and saw the Afghan stab the 27-year-old woman several times before fleeing the scene on foot and leaving the murder weapon behind.
Local police mobilised a helicopter and conducted a major search of the nearby area, catching the suspect a short time later, German newspaper Die Welt reports.
The victim was taken to a nearby clinic where emergency doctors were unsuccessful at reviving her, and she died of her wounds. The newspaper reports that the 27-year-old woman, who was also an Afghan, had split from her husband and had been living in a separate apartment before her death.
The 37-year-old alleged attacker is also no stranger to law enforcement in the area and is said to have previously attacked his wife in November of last year. Both the bus driver and those on board have been offered psychological counselling following the brutal murder.
The case is not the first time an asylum seeker in Germany has murdered a spouse. In 2016, a Syrian woman was killed by her husband when he beat her death, allegedly after physically assaulting her several times in the past.
The case in Obergünzburg also comes just months after a failed asylum seeker from Algeria was sentenced to eight years in prison for murdering a woman in a pub toilet in the city of Hamburg after the pair had sexual relations.
The 37-year-old Algerian had beaten to death 36-year-old Joselin H., the migrant then proceeding to dump the woman’s body in a nearby bush before watching pornography on his mobile phone.
In March 2019, a similar murder took place in the city of Worms that saw a 22-year-old failed asylum seeker, this time from Tunisia, stab his 21-year-old German ex-girlfriend to death following a dispute.