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Migrant wanted for rape, murder of German teenager caught in Iraq

An Iraqi migrant suspected of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in western Germany has been caught by Kurdish forces in Iraq, Germany's Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Friday, one day after German police issued an international warrant for his arrest.

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By
Sophie Rebmann, Nadine Schmidt
and
Judith Vonberg (CNN)
BERLIN, GERMANY (CNN) — An Iraqi migrant suspected of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in western Germany has been caught by Kurdish forces in Iraq, Germany's Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Friday, one day after German police issued an international warrant for his arrest.

Ali Bashar, a 20-year-old asylum-seeker, was arrested in northern Iraq early Friday at Germany's request, police said. He had fled from Germany to Iraq via Istanbul with his family on June 2.

"I thank the participating Kurdish security forces for making the arrest possible," Seehofer said.

Susanna Maria Feldman, a resident in the western German city of Wiesbaden, was reported missing by her mother on May 23.

By the time the police opened an investigation, Bashar and seven other family members -- all of whom lived in a refugee center in Wiesbaden -- had fled using identification papers that German authorities failed to identify as suspect. The plane tickets contained different names from those given on the residence documents for Bashar and his family, officials said.

Bashar was first linked with the case after a 13-year-old refugee told police in Wiesbaden on Sunday that the Iraqi man had raped and killed Feldman.

The teenager's body was found by police Wednesday close to a railway track in the Erbenheim area of Wiesbaden. Prosecutor Achim Thoma said that strangulation was the cause of death.

Bashar arrived in Germany in October 2015 and moved to Wiesbaden with his parents and siblings in April the following year, according to police. Bashar's asylum claim was rejected in December 2017. He is currently appealing that decision.

According to authorities, he had been involved in several incidents of low-level violence and is a suspect in the rape of an 11-year-old girl in March this year, but there had been no reason to arrest Bashar before the Feldman case.

A second suspect, a 35-year-old Turkish citizen, was arrested at his home in Wiesbaden Wednesday evening but has since been released and is no longer suspected of involvement.

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