Woman accused of murdering her doppelgänger wanted to stage her death to get away from her strict, religious community, prosecutor says

• A prosecutor in the "doppelgänger murder" trial said the suspect wanted to "start a new life."
• She said the suspect wanted to fake her own death to escape her religious community and family.

The woman standing trial for what has been dubbed the "doppelgänger murder" may have been driven by a desire to break free from her religious community and "start a new life," according to a prosecutor.

Sharaban K, a German-Iraqi woman, is facing trial in Ingolstadt, Germany, alongside her alleged accomplice, Sheqir K, in connection with the killing of German-Algerian beauty influencer Khadidja O in August 2022.

(The victims and accused have been referred to by only their first names and an initial, as is customary in the German legal system.)

Prosecutors alleged that Sharaban planned the murder by hunting down a lookalike on social media and killing her to fake her own death. She very briefly succeeded in the deception, they said.

When police found a body in August 2022, bloodied and covered in stab wounds, they identified it as Sharaban.

However, an autopsy later identified the corpse as belonging to Khadidja, who police said looked "strikingly like" Sharaban — who was then named as a suspect.

Early in the police investigation, it was suggested that Sharaban might have sought to go into hiding due to internal family conflicts, details of which have only recently emerged.

According to prosecutor Alexandra Engel, as reported by Bild, Sharaban aimed to fake her own murder to "start a new life."

Reports on the indictment and ongoing trial shed light on the complex situation Sharaban may have been trying to escape.

Citing prosecutors, Blick reported that Sharaban wanted to distance herself from her family and escape the strict norms of the Yazidi religious community in Germany.

The Yazidis, a Kurdish religious minority with a significant diaspora in Germany, have strict rules on marriages. Followers are expected to marry within the religion, often at a young age, and marriages are sometimes arranged based on a caste system.

According to Blick, Sharaban had married another Yazidi man of the same caste, but the relationship became tumultuous and ended in separation.

According to Der Spiegel, her husband threw her out of his apartment.

The newspaper said that Yazidi marriages are considered to be for life, and ending them can sometimes lead to an individual's expulsion from the community.

Der Spiegel said that trying to preserve a marriage regularly leads to long, complicated mediation attempts involving both families.

The newspaper reported that Sharaban's brother-in-law spoke out against the couple's reconciliation efforts during one mediation meeting.

In addition to the first-degree murder charge, Sharaban K is accused of an attempt to order a hit on that relative.

According to court proceedings, cited by Der Spiegel, prosecutors believe that Sharaban may have seen the murder of a lookalike as the only way to escape the intricate complexities of her family situation.

The victim's sister, Ahlem Boudjemaâ, previously told Business Insider that her family still doesn't understand the reason behind the killing and that her mother felt like they had been kept in the dark by the authorities.

At the time, Veronika Grieser of the Ingolstadt state prosecutor's office said: "We very much regret that the victim's mother feels inadequately informed by the authorities."

The trial is ongoing. BI has contacted Ingolstadt's state prosecutor's office for comment.