The confessions of the two young girls provoke great emotion in Germany, due to their age but also to the great violence with which the young girl was killed.
An “exceptional” news item, which upsets Germany. This Tuesday, two young girls aged 12 and 13 confessed to having killed with several stab wounds a 12-year-old friend, named Luise, who had been missing since Saturday in a small town across the Rhine.
The case revealed by the police and the prosecution during a press conference is unprecedented in the recent history of the country, and remains exceptional on a European scale.
Many stab wounds
Luise had been missing since leaving the home of a friend she had visited at the end of Saturday afternoon, not far from Freudenbergin the west of the country, the city of 17,000 inhabitants where the victim lived.
About three hours after his disappearance, his concerned parents had alerted the police. The lifeless body of their daughter was found by the police on Sunday in a wood a few kilometers from their home.
“She died after losing a lot of blood from numerous stab wounds,” said Koblenz prosecutor Mario Mannweiler. He said there was “no evidence of any sexual assault”.
The two suspects “gave information about the case and finally confessed to the facts,” said Florian Locker, Koblenz police chief, adding that their statements were consistent with the facts. The murder weapon has not yet been found.
Not criminally responsible
The two respondents knew each other, specifies the prosecutor, who however refuses to give the slightest additional detail, in particular on the fact of knowing if they were in the same class or the same school.
No element has also filtered on the identity of the suspects and the presumed motive for their act.
“It’s a complex subject and the reasons for their gesture must be analyzed according to their age. “What would be a possible motivation for a child may seem completely incomprehensible for an adult”, specifies Mario Mannweiler.
The two suspected girls were not known to the police. Under the age of 14, they are “not criminally responsible.” They were handed over to social services and youth protection.
“Speechless”
During the press conference, the investigators were obviously in shock. “After 40 years of service in the police, there are still events that leave us speechless,” said Koblenz police vice-president Jürgen Süss.
“The act itself is very exceptional and upsets us,” added the prosecutor.
The head of government of the regional state of North Rhine-Westphalia (west), Hendrick Wüst, did not hide his emotion either. “It is difficult to imagine and bear that children are capable of such acts,” he said during a press briefing.
According to this conservative leader, “the number of crimes and violent acts by adolescents or children under 14 has been increasing for several years”. He therefore called for more prevention work in this age group.
A message of condolence appeared on the website of Luise’s college in Freudenberg, a town about 80 kilometers from Bonn and Cologne, on Tuesday.
Rare fact in Europe
Few similar cases have occurred so far in Europe. By the age of the suspects, this drama recalls in particular that of Liverpool in 1993, when Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, aged 10 at the time, had kidnapped, tortured and killed the little James Bulger, two years old. The boy’s body was found two days later near a railway line.
Recently, in France, two teenagers, a 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl, had been sentenced on appeal in October 2022 for the murder of Alisha, a 14-year-old schoolgirl beaten and then thrown into the Seine in Argenteuil, in the Paris region, in 2021. They were fifteen years old at the time.
