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Police officer F. remembers the moment when he got the missing person report from Mezgin N. on the table.
It was a Friday in May 2017, the family was known to the police and the then 16-year-old had disappeared several days earlier and reappeared.
“There were more problems with the family.
We didn't rate it that high and I went into the weekend, ”says the policeman.
Little did he know that the young woman was no longer alive by then.
Hashem N., Mezgin's father, allegedly murdered his daughter the day before, after which he reported her missing.
Mezgin lived too west for him and had a friend, Sheikho R. The father had beaten the youngster for this earlier and threatened her with death.
On the third day of the trial against him before the Aschaffenburg district court, he tied his long hair in a ponytail and followed the witnesses' statements in a concentrated manner and without any visible emotion.
Several police officers and a friend of the murdered woman were summoned that day.
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The officer F. further describes that the situation suddenly changed decisively after the disappearance.
Because Hashem N. had reappeared and together with Sheikho R. wanted to confirm the missing person report again.
"Something was wrong," said the policeman in court.
Why did the father take the boyfriend with him, whom he turned down because of the premarital relationship with Mezgin?
The detective decided to look around the apartment.
Father willingly let him in.
The officer found Mezgin's passport and her second cell phone.
The mother had gone to Berlin, he learned.
"Why is she going to Berlin when the daughter has disappeared?" He asked Hashem N. It was just necessary to inform the relatives.
“So I said to myself: He killed her, we have to set up a special commission.
But it wasn't enough for my colleagues, ”says F.
His gut instinct drove him to see his homicide colleagues anew every day.
“You have to take care of that, he killed her one hundred percent,” he said at the time, he says.
But there was no corpse, no witnesses.
Mezgin was simply gone, unavailable, her Facebook account, which she filled every day, was orphaned.
And neither colleagues nor family seemed interested.
“Nobody was sad”, the policeman F. remembers his visit to the family.
"The daughter had disappeared a few days ago and nobody was interested."
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When two schoolgirls found Mezgin's soaked backpack under a bridge a few days later, it seemed clear that something must have happened to her.
The investigators now founded the Soko "Rucksack" and found further clues that point to the father.
A few months before Mezgin's death, for example, it became known that her father was threatening her.
"If you lie to me and have a boyfriend, I'll kill you," Mezgin told the police in 2016.
Besides, Hashem N. would beat her.
The district court of Aschaffenburg sentenced Mezgin's father to a nine-month prison sentence without parole on May 17, 2017, a few days after the daughter's death, for the mistreatment.
But the relationship between Mezgin and her father wasn't quite that clear after all.
Because the young person, who went into the care of the youth welfare office three times, kept coming back to the family.
She last moved back home on April 22, 2017, after spending a few days in the children's home.
The office had no way of detaining the young woman against her will in the accommodation and had to let her go.
The fear of the father, the beatings, the threats probably did not weigh as much as the consequences of a break with the family.
After all, the Syrians had only fled Aleppo to Germany in 2015.
The body was found after a year and a half
While his father, Hashem, worked as an unskilled worker at a parcel service, Mezgin flourished, spoke German quickly and was considered a lively student.
Your friend Magdalena Cz.
remembers her in court.
"She was very personable, always talked a lot, was a loud person," she says.
“We were really good friends, but we only had school to do,” she says.
Judge Sebastian Geis wants to know.
“She was never allowed out,” says the friend.
"She once said that she would like to meet, but was not allowed to." Her father did not allow it.
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On May 4, 2017, Magdalena was probably the last to see Mezgin alive.
The father picked her up from school in a friend's car.
Mezgin got in, probably completely unsuspecting what could happen.
“It was like always,” says Magdalena Cz.
According to the police's investigation, the father then drove her into a forest.
Either her father or her then 13-year-old brother killed her there, either by stabbing her with a knife or by an "attack on the neck", as it is called in police German.
The body was not found until a year and a half later in a concrete shaft in the forest.
Using the WhatsApp messages from their friends, the officers were able to reconstruct that the last message was read by Mezgin at 11:32 a.m.
After that, another message was delivered, but no longer read.
Shortly before noon, the cell phone was no longer available.
Hashem N. is silent on the allegations.
On June 1, 2017, he actually tried to kill Mezgin's friend, Sheikho R., with a knife, but he escaped and survived.
Hashem N. fled to Turkey immediately afterwards and was only arrested in Istanbul in 2019.
For him it was the last opportunity to kill Sheikho: One day later, on June 2, 2017, he should have started his nine-month prison sentence.
His defense attorney Jürgen Vongries tries to crack the investigators' chain of circumstantial evidence.
“Was the wife veiled?” He asks the police officers who are called as witnesses - apparently with the intention of questioning the cultural background of the crime, the assumed patriarchal-religious motivation.
Because Hevin N. probably did not wear a headscarf.
The criminal investigator Thomas B., who worked in the Soko, is sure that Hashem N. is the right person in court.
“We haven't found any other area of conflict,” he says.
"Everything is correct, the history, the attack on Sheikho R., the escape." There is no other suspect.
On the next day of the trial, Sheikho R., Mezgin N.'s friend, is supposed to testify.