Almost four years after the disappearance of the Syrian refugee girl Mezgin (†16), Judge Sebastian Geis acquitted her father Hashem N. (46) of murder suspicion on Thursday (22 April) at 3 pm. (46) from suspicion of murder: “In case of doubt for the accused! Yet after the six-week trial at the Aschaffenburg Regional Court, it was clear to all observers that no one had denied the fun-loving schoolgirl’s right to live more than her own father.
“In Syria, such women would not survive for long,” the accused said, according to witnesses, about his daughter’s sexy clothes and the 23-year-old boyfriend who had allegedly deflowered Mezgin.
On May 4, 2017, Hashem N. told his wife he was picking Mezgin up from the vocational school in Aschaffenburg. She was last seen by her teacher at 11.20 a.m., and a Whatsapp message from a friend at 11.37 a.m. she no longer read. That same evening, her father reported her missing. According to the officers who took the report, he seemed unconcerned – in the days that followed, he did not try to call his daughter on the mobile.
The police had long known about the violent past of the man who, according to witnesses, had already committed murder in Syria: On May 17, 2017, he was to stand trial for mistreating his daughter at the Aschaffenburg District Court. Jörg Albert (44), of all people, became the officer in charge of Mezgin’s missing person case. He testified in the trial: “A year before, I interrogated Mezgin because she had been abused by her father. She said she did not want to return to her family. If her father found out where she was, he would kill her.”
Nevertheless, there was a series of mishaps that led to the acquittal of the father four years later: the location data of his mobile phone could no longer be read out. His son Abdallahed (then 13) fooled the CID, first saying he did not know what had happened to his half-sister, but then saying he had been forced by him to stab Mezgin.
However, when a walker accidentally found Mezgin’s decomposed body in a concrete shaft in the forest near Haibach on December 9, 2017, there were no stab wounds and no other cause of death could be determined. The N. family’s home was only 650 metres away from the concrete shaft, witnesses had seen Hashem walking at the place where the body was found – and even his wife now told the CID: “I believe he committed the crime.”
Hashem N. had long since absconded to Turkey at that time: After being sentenced to nine months in prison for mistreating Mezgin, he was supposed to appear at the prison on June 2, 2018. An inspector had previously taken away his passport because of the threat of escape, but overheard Hashem N. talking on the phone about his disappearance and saying about Mezgin’s fate: “She disappeared like salt in boiling water.
On the morning of June 2, Hashem N. lured Mezgin’s friend Sheko R. (23), into the raft harbour on the Main and stabbed him in the neck. Afterwards he disappeared – and assured the tabloid BILD in a telephone conversation from Istanbul that he had nothing to do with the disappearance of his daughter.
It took until October 2020 for the investigators to bring Hashem N. back to Germany. But he will not have to remain in custody here for too long: Only for the attempted murder of Sheko R. did the judges sentence him to eight years and nine months in prison on Wednesday. Because of the prison conditions in Turkey, the year in the cell there will be counted twice. In addition, Hashem N. must pay 6,000 euros in damages to his victim. Jürgen Bundschuh, the public prosecutor, commented on the unsatisfactory outcome of the trial: “The rule of law must endure this.