I wrote about this case on Friday.

On May 22, Susanna Maria Feldman went missing. They found the 14-year-old girl’s body between the railroad tracks and Autobahn 66. The killer had stashed the girl under a bush and covered her over with twigs to keep the body out of sight and to buy him some time.

Susanna’s body had been dumped a few hundred meters from the refugee shelter where her alleged killer had been living.

While the German police were searching for Susanna’s body, the Bashar family, all eight of them, were on their way back to Iraq. The Bashar clan had been living in a refugee shelter even though they were apparently able to afford to book eight tickets to Turkey. The tickets were bought under different names than the ones they had used to apply for asylum in Germany

Ali Bashar, one of the six sons, had come to Germany through Turkey and Greece. He had arrived in Germany in the fall of 2015 at the height of Merkel’s migration crisis. Since then, he had been accused of raping an 11-year-old girl in a refugee shelter, attacking a policewoman and robbing a man at knifepoint

His asylum application had been rejected at the end of 2016. Bashar claimed to have been threatened by the PKK, a Kurdish group fighting against ISIS and Turkey.

But he appealed, and was allowed to stay on in Germany until he finally killed.

The Bashar family made a bad decision. If they had gone anywhere except back to Kurdistan, Ali would have likely gotten away with it. They also assumed it would be a local crime story.

But the story blew up. And Merkel came under pressure to get results.

Meanwhile the Kurds are threatened by everybody. And so their government really values its relationship with the West. So whatever protection the Bashar clan thought they had, didn’t hold up.

“I ordered three officers to investigate the case. After seven hours, the officers were able to identify the location of the accused murderer and arrest him,” explained Ahmed.

The police chief said after the accused while in custody “confessed to the crime of killing a 14 year-old German girl after he raped the girl.”

The KRG’s security and intelligence services cooperate with European governments and international agencies.

“We have had other similar cases; we have connection with other countries via Interpol to deal with criminals hiding in Kurdistan,” added Ahmed.

The KRG and German governments have had good diplomatic relations with the former having a representation office in Berlin, and the latter having a consulate general in Erbil.

“I thank the participating Kurdish security forces for making the arrest possible,” Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said on Friday.

Bashar is back in Germany. I suspect if he had been arrested in Germany, he wouldn’t have confessed to anything. And I have very little confidence in European justice and penal systems. At best, Bashar will get twenty years in prison. He’ll be out by the time he’s 41 years old. If not earlier.