Maria Ladenburger was on her way home from a party when she was attacked by an asylum seeker who strangled, raped and later drowned her in a river
A murderer’s sick web of lies finally unravelled with the help of data from his Apple Health App.
Maria Ladenburger, an EU official’s daughter, was a 19-year-old medical student living in Germany when her life was cruelly cut short in a horrific rampage.
The teen, who volunteered to help refugees in her spare time, had no clue she would be killed by an asylum seeker who lied about his age. She was cycling home at night when she was ambushed by Hussein Khavari.
The Afghan national admitted to strangling and raping Maria in October 2016. Though she survived the attack, sick Khavari then dragged her body to the bank of a river where she later drowned.
DNA tests linked him to the crime, but it was his Apple Health app that helped with a reconstruction of events in court. According to local German media, Khavari initially refused to admit his guilt and failed to allow access to his iPhone.
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But investigators were able to access his device after turning to a specialist cyber-forensics firm in Munich. On the phone, the Health App showed that Khavari had been exercising strenuously on the night of the murder.
The results suggested he had been climbing stairs, but police chillingly linked it to carrying a body down a river bank and then walking back up. An officer staged a reconstruction at the crime scene using his own Apple Health app – and it broadly matched Khavari’s.
Confronted with the findings, the twisted killer finally confessed and was found guilty at his 2018 trial. Maria was attacked while on her way home from a party in the south-western city of Freiburg.
Presiding Judge Kathrin Schenk said: “He knew that she was still alive as he laid her in the Dreisam [River], that she would drown, that she had to drown.”
After his arrest, it emerged that Khavari had already been convicted to 10 years in jail in Greece in 2014 for attempted murder after pushing a woman off a cliff. But he was freed in October 2015 due to overcrowded prisons.
He fled via Austria to Germany, where he arrived with no documents a month later, claiming he was 17-years-old. Because his DNA did not show up on a European register and there was no international arrest warrant for him, Freiburg’s youth welfare office placed him with a foster family.
But during the trial, evidence emerged suggesting that he could be as old as 32. The court accepted expert assessments, including X-rays of his bone structure and a dental analysis, and tried him as an adult, AFP news agency reports.
Hussein Khavari was sentenced to life in prison in 2018. In Germany, those sentenced to life in prison are eligible for early release after serving 15 years, but the presiding judge ordered special preventive detention making it all but impossible for Khavari.