Hussein Khavari, 17, the alleged killer of the medical student Maria Ladenburger

The father of a ‘teenage’ asylum seeker who has admitted to raping and killing an EU official’s daughter says his son is actually 33 years old.

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Afghan national Hussein Khavari entered Germany in 2015 claiming to be an ‘unaccompanied minor’ aged 16 – but dental estimates had suggested he was at least 22.

He admitted to raping and killing an EU official’s daughter in 2016, saying, ‘’When I saw how pretty she was, I wanted to have sex with her.

Being a minor would mean he faces a less harsh sentence.


Maria was 19 when she was killed (Picture: Facebook)

Presiding judge Kathrin Schenk told the trial she spoke on the phone with Khavari’s father, who lives in Iran.



He told Judge Schenk that his son was born on 29th January 1984, making him 33 years old.

Khavari had previously claimed that his father had died some years ago.

He was linked to Maria, when police found a single strand of his hair at the crime scene and other traces of his DNA on a scarf left behind.

Maria, whose father is a senior legal adviser to the European Commission in Brussels, would spend her spare time helping out the city’s migrants in various shelters and homes.

Pics shows: Hussein Khavari in court;

Her body was found in the Dreisam River less than one mile from the student accommodation where she lived.

It took seven weeks before Khavari was arrested.

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The killing sparked frenzied new waves of hatred and fear of refugees.

Even the leader of the country’s police union blamed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door asylum-seeker policy for her death.

The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party called Maria a ‘victim of Merkel’s welcome culture’.

Maria would spend her free time volunteering at Freiburg’s refugee shelters and homes (Picture: Facebook)

People queue to get into the murder trial in Freiburg (Picture: Patrick Seeger/dpa via AP)

The case fueled a nationwide debate about the country’s migration policy (Picture: Patrick Seeger/dpa via AP)

It later emerged that Khavari was previously sentenced to 10 years in prison for attempted murder after he threw a woman off a cliff in Corfu in May 2013.

It is still unclear why Khavari, who arrived in Germany as an unaccompanied minor, was released by Greek authorities after just two years.

Apparently the German authorities knew nothing of his past and so let him into the country as a registered asylum seeker.

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The victim, a history student, fell 25ft down the Greek cliff and only survived because she knew how to protect her head from her hobby of mountaineering.

She said she had been walking home when Khavari suddenly appeared in front of her: ‘I gave him my purse. But when the headlights of a car illuminated him he pushed me backwards.’

Speaking to the Greek TV channel Alfa in 2014 she went on: ‘Then he grabbed me at the hips and legs, lifted me up and threw me down the cliff.’

After Bild newspaper showed a recent photograph of him to his lawyer in the Greek trial, Maria-Eleni Nikolopoulou, she told them: ‘This is the same person, definitely. I’m speechless.’

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