A former security guard has been jailed for life after sexually abusing and murdering two children in Germany - one of them a four-year-old Bosnian migrant.

Mohamed Januzi was snatched by Silvio Schulz from a crowded migrant registration centre at the height of Germany's immigrant influx last year.

The 33-year-old's other victim was a six-year-old German boy named only as Elias, who was abducted from a playground in Potsdam.

Both boys were sexually abused before being strangled to "cover up the crimes that came before", judge Theodor Horstkoetter told the killer at a court in Potsdam, near Berlin.

Image: Aldiana Januzi, Mohamed's mother, was in court to hear the sentencing

Schulz has received death threats over the case, which has shocked the country.


He was arrested in October last year after Mohamed's mother identified him from security camera images captured at Berlin's Lageso registration centre.

Police said Schulz admitted abducting and abusing Mohamed last October before strangling him with a belt.

He also confessed to abducting Elias from a playground in Potsdam in July last year. He strangled him and buried his body in a rented garden plot.

Schulz, who hid his face in previous hearings in court, spoke to members of the victims' families who attended the sentencing.

"There is no word in the world to describe how sorry I am," he said. "If I could undo what has been done, I would. But I cannot forgive myself."

Image: Conditions around the Lageso centre were condemned

Mohamed was taken from a crowded and chaotic area outside the Lageso migrant centre.

At the time, the office was overwhelmed by record numbers of migrants as Germany let in more than one million migrants.

Conditions for the migrants outside Lageso were condemned by parliamentary vice president Claudia Roth as "shocking and unworthy of a democratic society".