Why leaders deny migrant crisis despite murder in Germany

Why leaders, deny migrant crisis,despite murder, in Germany,



Soon after 11pm, a BMW police car with lights flashing races through a pretty park in the university city of Freiburg at the edge of Germany’s Black Forest.

Out jump four officers with torches who chase five young men stumbling under the trees, swigging vodka and shouting loudly in Arabic.

I watch as one aggressive drunk is handcuffed before being frogmarched to an ambulance and taken to hospital. The others show their identity papers and are then thrown out into a side street, where they lunge at a small woman wheeling her suitcase from the railway station nearby.



The blonde, in her 20s, neatly side-steps them and walks away to safety. This time.

It’s the end of another long evening in Freiburg, which has proudly supported German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open her country’s door to migrants from all over the globe.

A sign on a lamp-post near the Freiburg park proclaims: ‘Refugees welcome. Bring your families.’ Meanwhile, city officials tell locals to do their bit by becoming foster parents and giving their spare bedrooms to the never-ending stream of arrivals.

By day, the city appears a charming place. German students on bicycles whizz past the 19th-century Gothic cathedral as tourists enjoy the open-air cafes and spring flowers. Yet it has the highest crime rate in this part of Germany, and by night many women dare not walk or drive alone.

They go to local clubs in large groups to protect themselves from being groped, or worse, by the huge numbers of foreign men settling here.



It was in the same park that Hussein Khavari, an Afghan asylum seeker, spent much of his time drinking vodka and smoking dope. He apparently set off from near here before raping and throttling to death 19-year-old German medical student Maria Ladenburger last October.

She was cycling home at 3am from a party at her university when she was ambushed. In a crime that shocked Germany, her body was dumped by the Driesam River, on the outskirts of the Black Forest, and discovered next morning by a jogger.

Khavari is about to stand trial for her murder after being charged with what prosecutors say was a crime committed ‘insidiously and for sexual satisfaction’. He is being held in a top security prison.

After his arrest, he told police he was 17, but medical age experts say Khavari lied and was 22 at the time of the murder of Maria, whom he had never met before.

In a further twist, it has emerged he slipped into Germany in November 2015, a year when one million or more migrants arrived.

Khavari claimed he came directly from Afghanistan and was an unaccompanied teenager fleeing the Taliban. But it has been discovered he is a dangerous adult criminal already convicted of trying to kill another young woman.



He had been sentenced to ten years in prison in Greece for throwing a student off a cliff on the island of Corfu. It was only because she was a mountaineer and knew how to protect her head in a fall that she miraculously survived.

Let off early, following a Greek law aimed at reducing prison overcrowding, Khavari served only two-and-a-half years before heading to Freiburg.

This has come as a shock to Germans, already reeling from the Berlin Christmas market killings and the hideous rape of a 23-year-old girl in front of her boyfriend by a 31-year-old machete-wielding Ghanaian facing deportation.

The couple were on a camping holiday in a national park near Bonn when she was attacked.

This week it was revealed that the crime rate among German’s migrant population rose by more than 50 per cent last year.

The news coincided with figures yesterday from the EU’s data arm Eurostat showing the number of refugees granted asylum in the European Union has doubled in just 12 months — from 333,305 in 2015 to 710,395 last year.

Germany alone granted asylum to 445,000 people in 2016, a three-fold increase in a year, accounting for 60 per cent of all those given refuge in Europe. (Britain granted protection to 17,080, the seventh highest number in the EU.)

Most of the crime hike was not caused by genuine refugees fleeing the Syrian crisis, but migrants from other countries — such as Afghanistan, the Balkans and Africa — who have slipped in, are unlikely to ever get asylum, yet have not been deported.



This is not something to gloss over,’ said Thomas de Maiziere, the Interior Minister, after the figures were released. ‘Those who commit serious offences forfeit their right to stay.’

A leaked German intelligence report warned last year of heightened public concern about mass immigration, particularly from Muslim countries.

It said: ‘We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other people, as well as a different understanding of society and law. Germany agencies are unable to