A baby dies violently in a refugee shelter near Schweinfurt, with no one but the mother present. At the start of the trial on Monday before the district court in Schweinfurt, the woman tearfully confessed to killing her child – and yet many questions remained unanswered. The accused and her husband presented different versions of their life together, which changed abruptly last August with the death of their three-month-old daughter. Since then, the girl’s probably 28-year-old mother has been in custody. The public prosecutor accuses the woman from Somalia of murder.
It is unclear how old the accused and her husband really are, since refugees sometimes come to Germany without papers and their ages are then estimated. With the help of an interpreter, the accused and her husband explained that they finally came to Germany via Greece and France. In July 2022, they were accommodated in a refugee accommodation in Geldersheim near Schweinfurt – together with their baby. “I had no opportunity to give my daughter milk,” said the woman, crying. Her husband beat her and she was harassed by staff and other migrants in the so-called anchor center. Her husband told everyone she was crazy.
Before the Greater Criminal Court, the woman appeared to be desperate and hopeless, nobody helped her, especially not the child’s father. “Then I decided to kill my daughter,” she said. She got the crime knife with a blade more than twelve centimeters long from a family with whom she shared a toilet. “It was all too much for me.” You lost control. “Then I killed the little one,” she said in court. The child bled to death in room 238 B after the crime.
The girl’s father, who is believed to be 29, also cried when he said: “I never thought that she would do anything to the child.” He admitted to occasionally hitting the defendant during an argument, allegedly to ward off her attacks. “I know she has problems in her head.” She took medication for a while – he doesn’t know exactly what. And she had already injured two people with a knife in Greece and herself. He loves his wife, he forgives her, the man said. The defendant just looked at him coolly.
The court and the psychiatric expert repeatedly appealed to the accused to describe their situation on the day of the crime and to explain why they stabbed the girl in the neck. “You run the risk of receiving life imprisonment,” said presiding judge Claudia Guba of the young woman with the white sweater and curly hair. “I think you felt all alone,” said the renowned psychiatrist Hans-Peter Volz to the accused. “Did you just want to have one less problem, namely the child?” So far, two days of negotiations have been scheduled for the process. The verdict could be pronounced next Thursday.