A German court, on Monday, delivered a verdict in the trial of a couple who killed a Ukrainian refugee and her mother in March 2024 to steal a newborn baby.

The German couple admitted to killing the 27-year-old Ukrainian woman and her 51-year-old mother in order to abduct the younger woman’s five-week-old baby on the first day of the trial at Mannheim District Court

The accused told the court that after suffering a number of miscarriages and failed fertility treatment, they hatched a plan to kidnap a newborn girl and pass her off as their daughter.

According to the public prosecutor’s office, the couple have a total of four children, including one son together.

The 45-year-old woman and her 43-year-old husband are from Sandhausen, near Heidelberg.

“I regret everything I have done,” the man said in a statement read out by lawyers on January 7. His wife added, “I made a big mistake.”

The prosecution has brought charges of murder and child abduction.

The couple intentionally targeted refugees from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, joining a group on Telegram to offer help with translation, prosecutors said.

The younger Ukrainian woman was living with her mother and baby in a refugee accommodation in the south-western German town of Wiesloch when she came into contact with the couple.

Earlier, on March 6, 2024, they allegedly sedated the two Ukrainian refugees in a restaurant before the man killed them with a blunt object in two separate locations.

They sank the grandmother’s body in a lake and burnt the mother’s body before driving home with the baby. 

(dpa/NAN)