Germany's Federal Court of Justice has upheld life sentences for a married couple convicted of murdering two Ukrainian women to steal their baby, according to Mannheimer Morgen.
The country's highest criminal court rejected the husband's appeal against the February ruling by Mannheim Regional Court, according to the report. His wife did not file an appeal, making the conviction legally final.
The Mannheim court found that the couple killed a 27-year-old Ukrainian woman and her 51-year-old mother to pass off the younger woman's five-week-old baby as their own child. "Before the birth they had already made contact with the pregnant Ukrainian via social media," the court determined. The victims lived in a refugee shelter in Wiesloch in the Rhine-Neckar district.
According to the court's findings, the couple gave both women a drink laced with sedatives after a joint dinner. The husband then "killed them with a rubber hammer, disposed of one body in a lake and set the other on fire with gasoline."
The couple subsequently presented the infant as their biological child. The wife had previously obtained a fraudulent birth certificate from the registry office for her supposedly home-born daughter.
A passerby discovered the 27-year-old woman's body on the Rhine riverbank in early March 2024. Police arrested the couple several days later and found the baby unharmed in their custody.
The child was eventually returned to Ukraine, where she remains under her aunt's care, according to the report.
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