Luise “was killed by two girls she knew”, explained the public prosecutor of Koblenz, Mario Mannweiler, during a press conference.
By VP with AFP
© ROBERTO PFEIL / DPA / dpa Picture-Alliance via AFP
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DTwo preteens aged 12 and 13 are suspected of having stabbed a 12-year-old girl close to them to death in a forest near Freudenberg, the Koblenz public prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday.
The young victim, Luise, “was killed by two girls she knew”, Koblenz public prosecutor Mario Mannweiler told a press conference.
The two suspects “gave information about the case and finally confessed to the facts”, said Florian Locker, Koblenz police chief, at the same conference.
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“Exceptional and shocking” facts
“The two suspects are under the age of 14 and are therefore not criminally responsible,” added Mario Mannweiler, stressing the “exceptional and shocking” nature of the facts. He did not give details on the supposed reasons for their gesture, nor on the identity of the two suspects.
Luise had been missing since she left, late Saturday afternoon, the home of a friend she had visited, not far from Freudenberg (west), the town of 17,000 inhabitants where the victim. About three hours after his disappearance, his parents, worried, 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. The murder weapon has not yet been found. 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”, underlined Mario Mannweiler.
“What would be a possible motivation for a child may seem completely incomprehensible to an adult,” he added. The two suspected girls were not known to the police.
” Speechless “
During the press conference, the investigators were obviously in shock. “After forty 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.
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, 2 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 Paris region, in 2021. They were 15 years old at the time.