“A lot of people currently think that our family was complicit with the boy. The family isn’t complicit with him. The family doesn’t even know whether he has done it or not. If he has, he has kept it a secret,” Bashar’s brother told Rudaw.
“We were there for four years. Then my father had a heart attack. We returned due to our father,” the brother said, rebuffing claims they had fled justice on fake passports.
“Our family didn’t know a thing. If our family knew, we wouldn’t [have returned to Iraq],” the brother said.
The family would like to return to Germany, he said.
Bashar, a failed Kurdish asylum seeker, was extradited to Germany to stand trial after confessing to the rape and murder of 14-year-old Susanna Maria Feldman in the German city of Wiesbaden. He had fled to Erbil with his family on false identity papers.
Although Iraq and Germany do not have a formal extradition treaty, the 20-year-old was put on a Frankfurt-bound Lufthansa flight at Erbil International Airport on Sunday evening.
Bashar was detained by police in Duhok on Friday after Germany’s interior ministry contacted the Kurdistan Regional Government Ministry of Interior.
Duhok police chief Tariq Ahmed told Rudaw the accused, while in custody, “confessed to the crime of killing a 14 year-old German girl after he raped the girl.”
German police began investigating after Feldman’s mother reported her missing from her home in Wiesbaden on May 23. Her body was found at a nearby railroad track.
German prosecutor Achim Thoma said the cause of death was strangulation.
Bashar had been living in a center for refugees with relatives in the same city near Frankfurt.
AFP reported he arrived in Germany in 2015 with his parents and five siblings. The agency added his asylum request was rejected in December 2016, but he obtained temporary residency pending his appeal.
Immigration and asylum have become highly politicized issues in Germany. Last week, pro- and anti-immigration protests were held simultaneously in the capital.
In Germany, asylum seeking peaked at 890,000 in 2015. It dropped to 280,000 in 2016, and 186,644 in 2017 — due in part to a deal between the European Union and Turkey for the latter to provide shelter to refugees in exchange for billions of euros.
