A 23-year-old woman in Munich has been accused of brutally killing a beauty blogger who looked just like her. Police say the suspect searched online for a doppelgänger with the plan of killing her in order to fake her own death.
The suspect has been identified as Sharaban K., a German-Iraqi woman who reached out to the victim online and messaged her about makeup and beauty before asking to meet up with her.
Sharaban K. then allegedly lured in her victim by promising to give her a cosmetics kit, the Times UK reports.
Authorities say that Sharaban K. and her boyfriend, Shequir K., picked up Khadidja O., who lived in Eppingen, and drove her to a forest in Ingolstadt. There, police believe she was stabbed more than 50 times.
The victim's face was brutally mutilated and her body was left in the back of Sharaban K.'s car.
Then Sharaban K. disappeared. When she didn’t return home that day, Sharaban K.'s parents went out to look for her. They were the ones who discovered the abandoned car with the deceased woman’s body in the trunk.
Sharaban K.’s family, who thought she'd been visiting an ex-husband that day, instantly believed that she was the victim, due to the resemblance between her and the real victim.
But an autopsy proved that the body was actually Khadidja O.
The weapon that was used has still not been found.
"It has been confirmed that the accused had contacted several women via Instagram before the act who seemed to look similar to her," Attorney General Veronika Grieser told German outlet Bild. "It can be assumed that the suspect wanted to go into hiding, due to internal disputes with her family, and fake her own death."
The accused and her boyfriend were both detained by police in August and have been charged with murder.
"It was an extraordinary case that demanded all the investigators' skills," Andreas Aichele of the local police force told Bild. "We don't have a case like this every day — especially with such a spectacular twist."
"On the day we found the body, we didn't expect it to turn out like this," he said.
The couple could face life in prison if found guilty.
Aichele told Bild that “the murder weapon has still not been found but the burden of proof is overwhelming.”
"The victim was killed with more than 50 stab wounds and her face was badly injured. That was brutal in the extreme,” he added.
The blogger, also 23, had several videos uploaded to TikTok with hundreds of thousands of views.
