Teenage Girl Admits to Fabricating Migrant Rape Claim That Outraged Germany

A 13-year-old Russian-German girl has admitted to making up a story about being kidnapped and raped by Middle Eastern or north African migrants in a case that outraged Germans and caused far-right protests in Russia.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov criticized Berlin’s authorities for mishandling the response, saying, “The news that she disappeared was kept secret for a very long time.”

The Guardian reports:

The parents of the teenager, named only as Lisa, reported her missing on 11 January after she failed to appear at school in the Marzahn district of the capital. She reappeared 30 hours later with injuries on her face, and told her parents she had been attacked by men of Middle Eastern or north African appearance. News of the incident spread on social media, sparking outrage among Berlin’s Russian-German community.

But when she was questioned by trained specialists three days later “she immediately admitted that the story of the rape was not true”, said the spokesman for the state prosecutor, Martin Steltner. […]

[…] the allegations caused uproar in Berlin, particularly after reports of mass sexual assaults allegedly carried out by migrants in Cologne. A Russian-German community group staged a protest, supported by the Pegida-related Bärgida movement. The far-right National Democratic party also demonstrated in Marzahn. […]

[The teenager’s] mother told Der Spiegel magazine on Sunday that Lisa was “doing very badly” and was having treatment in a psychiatric ward.

Read more here.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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