A 22-year-old asylum seeker from Mali has been found guilty in a German court of strangling a Romanian woman to death after robbing her.

The murder, which occurred last year in September in the city of Regensburg, saw the 22-year-old hire the 33-year-old Romanian for sexual services, with the intent to rob her and strangled her afterwards.

According to the migrant’s lawyer his purpose in strangling the woman was not to kill her but to render her woman unconscious, Die Welt reports.

The failed asylum seeker was captured by police five days after the murder because he took the mobile phone of the victim with him, and it was used by officers to track him down.

According to his lawyer, the man committed the crime because he was poor and needed money to help his partner and child who were living in Italy. The man is said to have been given advice from another migrant at the asylum shelter he was living to rob the prostitute.

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Following the murder, the Malian claimed that he thought he had only rendered his victim unconscious, acting surprised when investigators had told him she was dead.

The lawyer added that the asylum seeker regretted the murder but despite his testimony, the judge in the case refused to grant the three-and-a-half year sentence requested by the defence.

The case follows another guilty verdict in the trial of a failed Tunisian migrant in neighbouring Austria, who murdered an elderly couple in the city of Linz for being supporters of the populist anti-mass migration Freedom Party.

Germany has seen many other high-profile cases of asylum seekers killing women and young girls, including the case of 15-year-old Mia in Kandel, the rape and murder of Maria Ladenburger, and most recently the murder of Jewish teen Susanna F., who was allegedly killed by an Iraqi asylum seeker.