Miranda Aldersley, Daily Mail, November 27, 2018
Two Afghan men are alleged to have held down and raped a 15-year-old girl in the state of Brandenburg last Tuesday.
Police arrested one man on Friday evening but are still searching for his accomplice, reportedly a refugee who entered Germany as an unaccompanied minor.
A 21-year-old man identified only as Mohammad F. and an acquaintance, 18, are said to have followed the victim and dragged her into the public toilet at a playground in Königs Wusterhausen, a few kilometers outside Berlin.
There, Mohammad F. is accused of raping the girl while his accomplice pinned her down.
According to the police, the teenager came to the police station to report the crime on Thursday afternoon, two days after it took place.
The victim was said to have been so traumatized that the questioning had to be stopped and resumed the following day.
In the second interrogation, the girl told police the name of the main offender.
On Friday night, investigators arrested Mohammad F. and he has since remained in custody.
According to the German news outlet BILD, the accomplice is an 18-year-old friend of the suspect.
He is said to be an Afghan who came to Germany as an unaccompanied minor refugee, but is already known to the police for assault charges.
The two men are said to have followed the victim into a public toilet, where she was raped by Mohammed F. and his accomplice pinned her down
According to the head of the refugee centre where the teenager is housed, the 18-year-old is currently on ‘holiday’ in another state.
Responding to the question of why the public was not told of the incident, a police spokesman said to BILD: ‘At the time (Friday), it would have made no sense to issue a press release because we could not have named the offender.’
However, the newspaper quoted an anonymous police source as saying: ‘The incident was kept under lock and key by the city and police, because they fear another reaction like what happened in Freiburg.’
The source was referring to an incident in the south-western city of Freiburg last month, in which an 18-year-old girl was gang raped in an attack allegedly orchestrated by a 22-year-old Syrian man.
The suspect, known as Majd H., is said to have targeted the girl after drugging her in a nightclub on October 14 and enlisting several other men to partake in the brutal four-hour assault.
Majd H. had been a suspect in two prior sex crimes and was known to police. BILD reported that at the time of the incident, there was already a warrant out for his arrest.
Last month’s incident sent shockwaves through Germany, particularly after it was reported in local newspapers that Majd H., who came to the country in 2014, had links to a Kurdish militia and had posted pictures of himself posing with a machine gun on social media.