In Case That Shook Germany, Migrant Is Convicted of Killing Girl, 15

BERLIN — A German court convicted a young migrant who is believed to be from Afghanistan of murdering his 15-year-old girlfriend and sentenced him to eight and a half years in prison on Monday, in a case that has become a flash point for fears over immigration.

The killing, in December 2017, took place in daylight in a drugstore in a small western German town, shocking the nation and emerging as a rallying cry for the far right and others opposed to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policies of recent years.

The verdict comes amid rising tensions in the eastern city of Chemnitz, where the fatal stabbing of a German man last month by a Syrian and an Afghan, both asylum seekers, further stoked outrage.

Violent protests led by the far right, which maintains that the government is no longer able to guarantee the safety of Germans in the face of violent crime committed by migrants, gripped the city for days, leaving dozens injured, although violent crime is far from its peak in Germany.

On Monday, in the drugstore case, a court convicted a man identified by the authorities as Abdul D. of plunging a kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade into the heart of his ex-girlfriend. In the days after the attack, hundreds of people flooded Kandel, a quiet town near the French border.

Prosecutors argued that the young asylum seeker had been jealous after the victim, who in keeping with German privacy law has been identified only as Mia V., broke up with him several weeks earlier.

Twelve days before she was stabbed, she filed a report with the police accusing the defendant of insulting and threatening her, and her father then reported him to the authorities two days before her death.

Mia was killed more than a year after a German medical student was raped and strangled by an Afghan in Freiburg, and days after a German woman was raped by a Sudanese migrant in the nearby town of Speyer, two attacks that further hardened views on the far right.

The mayor of Kandel, Volker Poss, said right-wing groups were organizing demonstrations in the town for later Monday, to protest what they saw as an overly lenient sentence for the killing.

The court handled the case as a juvenile offense, because Abdul had claimed he was 15 at the time of the killing. Although an expert analysis had suggested he was over 17, and possibly as old as 20, authorities decided not to try him as an adult. That meant the trial was closed to spectators and the maximum penalty was 10 years in prison.

Migrants under the age of 18 are treated as juveniles in Germany, meaning they are afforded better benefits, including access to schooling and protection from deportation until they become adults. This has led many young men to enter the country without documents and lie about their age.

There is also some question about the defendant’s origins. He said he was from Afghanistan, but officials have been not been able to confirm that.

He arrived in Germany in 2016, a year that saw a surge of migration to Europe, primarily from the Middle East and Africa, and applied for asylum as a refugee. Like one of the suspects in Chemnitz, he had been denied asylum but had not yet been deported.

Although violent crime in Germany remains overall below its 2007 peak, anti-immigrant activists and far-right politicians have seized on violent crimes committed by migrants to argue that they pose a threat to the country’s safety, as well as to its national identity.

In Chemnitz, an industrial city near the border with the Czech Republic, several thousand people were expected to join a locally based punk band and local leftist groups at a concert of leading German punk, rap and rock acts seeking to take back the narrative from the right-wing nationalists under the motto “We Are More.”

Over the weekend, the police said 4,500 people had turned out for a memorial march organized by the nationalist Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party in Chemnitz, while some 4,000 counter demonstrators held their own rally for tolerance.