BERLIN — When a 19-year-old medical student was found raped and drowned in the university city of Freiburg in October, it was seen as a sad and awful crime, but a local one. Beyond a few tabloids, the story failed to make national headlines.

But when the Freiburg police announced last Saturday that they had arrested an Afghan refugee for the crime, reaction was swift and bitter. The Facebook page of Freiburg’s local newspaper was flooded with comments about “Rapefugees,” suggesting that “such cases require special SHOWERS to be set up again.”

Some national news organizations picked up the news of the arrest of the suspect, an Afghan teenager who arrived in Germany last year without his family. The mass-circulation Bild newspaper ran it under the headline “How Do We Handle This Truth?”

But only after Chancellor Angela Merkel and members of her cabinet weighed in on the fierce debate over that question did the country’s leading public broadcaster, ARD, pick up the story, which it had originally judged did not meet the threshold for national news.