Woman who posed as Germanwings crash relative gets year on probation
NAN-F-6
Probation
Berlin, Oct. 26, 2016 (dpa/NAN) A 35-year-old woman who posed as a relative of one of the victims of the Germanwings plane crash in 2014 was on Wednesday convicted on two counts of fraud and handed one year on probation.
Prosecutors said she pretended to be the cousin of one of the 150 Germanwings crash victims in order to get flights for herself, her two children and an acquaintance to the crash site in France.
The woman was pretending to be related to be a teacher escorting a group of 16 school children.
The flight later crashed in an Alpine mountainside in 2014 after being deliberately brought down by co-pilot Andreas Lubitz.
“Lufthansa, Germanwings’ parent company, organised and paid for special flights so that relatives could visit the crash site.
“The flights and hotel costs claimed by the defendant amounted to 17,500 dollars,’’ prosecutors said.
In another development, a couple was on trial in Hoexter, Southern Germany for torturing women to death.
The couple was accused of luring women into their home and torturing them so badly that two of them died faced trial on charges of negligent homicide and bodily harm.
Prosecutors said Wilfred W, and his former wife Angelika W both in their mid-40s – lured eight women into their home by posting classified ads in the newspaper only to hold them captive and systematically abuse them.
The case became public in April, when prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for the couple after it emerged that one of their alleged victims had died in hospital from blunt trauma to the head.
The victim had endured several weeks of torture.
Prosecutors learned about a second victim from extensive testimony given by the 47-year-old female suspect, who revealed that she and her ex-husband had killed a woman in 2014.
She confessed that they frozen the body of the woman that was killed and subsequently burnt it bit by bit in their house.
Chief prosecutor Ralf Meyer said that the police investigation showed that the man and his former wife were driven not by a sexual motive, but by the desire to “exert power.” dpa/NAN)
Edited by Damilola Oyewole/ Julius Enehikhuere