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It was in May 2017 when strollers found Mezgin N.'s backpack under a bridge over the Main, two weeks after she had disappeared.
After examining the bag, the police neatly listed its contents: ten artificial fingernails, pieces of chocolate, a student ID, lip liner, highlighters, a small bottle, a bunch of keys, school books, a pencil case, pads and a notebook.
Objects that describe the life of a 16-year-old between school and dressing table.
Mezgin, who came to Germany from Syria in 2015, lived like millions of teenagers in Germany.
She wore tight pants and tops, had a Facebook account and recently had a friend, Shekho R. But what is normal for most young women was life-threatening for Mezgin.
Her father Hashem accused her of walking around too lightly dressed.
He read her chats, confronted her.
And he freaked out when he heard that she had a boyfriend and was sleeping with him.
Hashem N. beat his daughter with fists, a belt.
He smashed her cell phone that Shekho had got her.
Mezgin said to a police officer, "I'm afraid he'll kill me." That was a year before her death.
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Last Thursday, the trial of Hashem N., who was charged with the murder of his daughter by the public prosecutor, began at the Aschaffenburg regional court.
He committed the act because, in his eyes, Mezgin lived in the West.
Mezgin is thus one of around 300 women who are killed in Germany each year.
New criminological research has introduced the term “femicide” for this.
Mostly it is former life partners or ex-friends, but sometimes brothers, cousins or fathers who kill.
Women who come from patriarchal countries are much more at risk: around a third of all murders that the Federal Criminal Police Office lists under “violence in partnerships” are committed by men who do not have a German passport.
The proportion of foreigners in this country is only a good seven percent.
The chairman of the Bund Deutscher Kriminalbeamter, Sebastian Fiedler, is alarmed.
"The so-called honor killings are a phenomenon that has worried us for many years," he tells WELT AM SONNTAG.
"Prevention and intervention are a major challenge in this environment," says Fiedler.
The “exaggerated concept of honor”, which can be found in certain milieus, “cannot be brought into harmony with our Basic Law”.
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In addition to the lawsuit against Hashem N., three other similar lawsuits are currently running in Germany.
In Deggendorf, a jury court is negotiating against the 28-year-old Shaeiq S. The Afghan stabbed his ex-girlfriend Tatjana S. to death in front of their eight-month-old child last year.
The 20-year-old suffered 18 stitches in her upper body.
The immigrant Afghan Salih M. pulled out a knife in a public bus in July 2020 and rammed it into the head and chest of his wife, who was separated from him.
Four children remain behind.
According to the prosecution, the 38-year-old developed "considerable resentment" against the woman and feared that he would "lose prestige in the Afghan community".
The third case: Today, Monday, the Stuttgart Regional Court will announce its verdict in the trial against a 36-year-old German who hit his ex-partner, 41, with a wooden slat before cutting her throat - afterwards he should her sleeping nine-year-old daughter have killed.
The motive: jealousy.
Sebastian Fiedler, chairman of the Association of German Criminal Investigators
Source: dpa-infocom GmbH
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The self-authorization of men to punish women with death if they separate from their partners poses problems for police officers and authorities alike.
The problem men can hardly be impressed with difficult-to-enforce contact bans - and young women threatened by brothers or fathers often react cautiously to care offers from the municipalities: They often do not want to risk an open break with the family and usually return to their parents' home.
It was the same in the Mezgin S. case. The youth welfare office offered her several times to take her out of the family.
But the 16-year-old usually only lasted a few weeks in a facility.
And so some perpetrators do not develop any awareness of wrongdoing even after the crime.
Hashem N. did not seem particularly touched on his first day of trial.
He followed the proceedings with interest, had on gold reading glasses and was taking notes.
He seemed so uninvolved, as if it were about the withdrawal of his driver's license.
Not even when the video was shown showing the recovery of the derelict corpse of his daughter Mezgin that he showed any emotion.
Only the jeans and the white sneakers could be seen of her.
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