The dead woman, it turns out, was another 23-year-old woman who police said "looked strikingly similar" to the suspect.
"The suspects came up with the plan to search online for a woman who looked similar to the German-Iraqi, kill her and place her in such a way that the corpse would be mistaken for the suspect," police said in a statement Monday.
“She offered them various benefits in order to achieve a meeting. However, it did not come to a meeting with those women,” prosecutor Dr. Veronika Grieser said.
According to the Bavarian police, the main suspect contacted the victim through social media in early August and arranged a meeting on Aug. 16. She traveled with her friend in her car to the greater Heilbronn area, around 150 miles west of Ingolstadt, to pick up the victim at home, police said.
The victim was lured out of the vehicle and stabbed to death in a wooded area “insidiously and for base motives,” the statement added.
Fiona Brookman, a professor of criminology at the University of South Wales, called the case “very unusual,” not least because females make up 10% or less of homicide cases. Female-on-female cases are even rarer, she added.
Finally, “committing a murder in order to fake one’s own death — I have never come across a homicide of this kind before,” she added.
Andy Eckardt reported from Mainz, Germany, and Aina J. Khan from London