A German couple who confessed to the murder of a Ukrainian refugee and her mother last year in order to kidnap a newborn child were sentenced to life imprisonment on Monday, February 10. This was reported by DW, according to UNN.
The Mannheim Land Court in southern Germany has sentenced a 45-year-old woman and her 43-year-old husband to life in prison for the March 2024 murder of a Ukrainian woman and her mother and the kidnapping of a child
It is noted that the court assumed that the couple intended to pass off the child of one of the victims as their own, and also established the particular gravity of their guilt. This means that early release from prison for those convicted after 15 years in prison is virtually impossible.
According to the prosecutor's office, the couple killed 51-year-old Ukrainian refugee Marina Stetsenko and her 27-year-old daughter Margarita to take the latter's child. The murder was committed after the perpetrators secretly put psychotropic substances in the victims' food. It allegedly happened during a dinner at a Chinese restaurant where the attackers' spouses had invited the victims under the pretext of celebrating their birthday.
After a two-week search, the body of a 51-year-old woman was found on the shore of a lake near the town of Hockenheim. A few days earlier, police in Hockenheim found her daughter's body on the banks of the Rhine with signs of violent death. Investigators found that after the murder, the 27-year-old woman had been set on fire.
According to the investigation, the motive for the crime was the couple's desire to have a girl. As Die Zeit journalists found out, the accused couple already have children, whom they raised together. The woman has two sons from her first marriage, as well as an eight-year-old son at the time of the crime. The man, according to the newspaper, has a daughter from his first marriage, whom he rarely saw
The man confessed to psychologists that he wanted to make his wife happy by fulfilling her dream of a daughter. The perpetrators considered various options to get the girl, including kidnapping a newborn baby in a hospital. Eventually, however, a plan was hatched to kidnap the child of one of the Ukrainian refugees.
Recall
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