An Afghan man on trial for the rape and murder of an EU official’s daughter in Germany could be found guilty with the help of the data from his iPhone.
The pre-installed Health app recorded Hussein Khavari performing ‘strenuous activity’ at the time when Maria Ladenburger, 19, was attacked in Freiburg in October 2016.
Khavari has admitted to raping and killing the medical student, but claims her death was an accident.
Caught out: Afghan migrant Hussein Khavari’s iPhone recorded him as ‘climbing stairs’ which would match him dragging his victim down a river bank and climbing back up again
Prosecutors in Freiburg dispute Khavari’s account of the murder and say he planned it beforehand.
They have used the data from the defendant’s iPhone app, which records the amount of steps taken and stairs climbed in a day using movement and elevation, to match two peaks in his movement with the attack.
The elevation recorded as ‘climbing stairs’ would ‘correlate to him dragging his victim down a riverbank and climbing back up’, police said according to the BBC.
Police sent out an officer carrying an iPhone to re-create the walk down to the river, and climb back up the bank and the Health app recorded the movement as ‘climbing stairs’.
Last month it was revealed that Khavari, who had claimed he was 17 when he arrived in Germany to be granted asylum as an ‘unaccompanied minor’, is in fact 34 years old, according to his own father.
Charged: Hussein Khavari has admitted to raping and murdering 19-year-old medical student Maria Ladenburger in Freiberg, Germany, last year
Data proof: iPhone’s Health app records the amount of steps taken and stairs climbed in a day using movement and elevation
Dental checks had found with ‘near certainty’ that Khavari is aged between 22 and 29 years old, but his father, who lives in Iran, informed the court via telephone that his son is born in January 1984, Welt reports.
A dental research scientist had said it has been established with 99.7 per cent probability that his true age is between 22.05 and 29.55 years.
Despite initially claiming to be 17, Khavari has since admitted said he did not know his true age but that he was no older than 19 – an age which would see him sentenced as a juvenile.
Khavari had earlier testified that on the night of the killing he was so drunk he was ejected from a bar and left alone by his friends in town.
He claims he accidentally came across Maria who shouted out as she fell from her bicycle.
He said he pressed her mouth shut then choked her with a scarf and put her unconscious into the water.
‘When I saw how pretty she was, I wanted to have sex with her,’ he said, but claims he was too drunk.
Khavari’s trial is taking place in Freiburg, where he was seen in handcuffs being led in to court (pictured)
He broke down in court and added: ‘I want to apologize to the family of Maria’.
Reading from a statement he went on: ‘I beg your pardon. I want to apologise to the family of Maria. I wish I could undo it. What I have done, I am sad for from the bottom of my heart ‘.
Khavari ended a life rich in potential and polarised a nation struggling to adapt to over a million refugees in its midst.
It was learned after his arrest that he had been arrested and sentenced to ten years for attempted murder in Corfu in 2013 before coming to Germany seeking refuge in 2015 as an ‘unaccompanied minor.’
German authorities knew nothing of his past and so let him into the country as a registered asylum seeker.
His victim, whose father is a senior legal adviser to the European Commission in Brussels, worked in her spare time in Freiburg helping out migrants in various shelters and homes.
The killing sparked frenzied new waves of hatred and fear of refugees. Even the leader of the country’s police union said her death would have been prevented had the open door asylum-seeker policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel been less lax than it is.