After months of investigations and extensive searches, a missing woman has been found dead and a suspect has been arrested. The 35-year-old had been ordered into custody on suspicion of murder and violating the narcotics law, senior public prosecutor Dominik Mies told the German Press Agency on Wednesday. The woman from Montabaur in Rhineland-Palatinate had previously been searched intensively on and in the Lahn River between Villmar and Runkel.
The decisive breakthrough came from a tip about the suspect’s sporadic whereabouts in Limburg, said Mies. The woman’s body was found in the premises there on Monday and the 35-year-old was then arrested on Wednesday. He did not provide any information about the allegations.
According to the senior public prosecutor, the investigators assume that the man probably injected the 34-year-old with a drug and then she collapsed. “He is said not to have helped her, but rather packed her in a bag and taken her to the Lahn,” said Mies. The suspect is said to have put it down and the woman died there.
The 35-year-old is said to have later picked up the body – possibly because of the police search – and brought it to the room where the dead woman was finally found. The exact cause of death was not yet known, they said they were waiting for the autopsy results.
According to Mies, corpse-sniffing dogs played an important role in the investigation: They not only stopped in the area where the suspect was said to have occasionally stayed, but also on the Lahn.
The 34-year-old had been missing since Christmas Eve last year. Mies had previously spoken of indications that she had died “an unnatural death” in the greater Limburg area and that her body had been dumped in or on the Lahn between Villmar and Runkel. The disappearance of the woman, in whose environment, according to the public prosecutor’s office, drugs are said to have played a role, was the subject of the ZDF program “Aktenzeichen XY… unsolved” in September.
