The new “Polizeiruf 110: Unsterblich” describes an exceptionally unscrupulous crime: After the beauty influencer Aalisha Mansour (Hannah Gharib, 26) fell into disgrace among her one and a half million followers by advertising a fake diet product, she forged a perfidious plan, to escape their previous life. Together with her friend, she makes contact with an Instagram admirer who looks strikingly similar to her and lures her into a deadly trap. In order to fake her own suicide, Aalisha first restyles the victim into the perfect doppelganger and then throws her off the roof of a shopping mall.
As Michael Gantenberg (62), author of the script for “Polizeiruf 110: Unsterblich”, reports in an interview with Das Erste, the thriller plot of his script is based on a real murder case that has made headlines in recent years. This is the so-called “doppelganger murder”, which has been being tried in the Ingolstadt regional court since August 2023, without a verdict being announced so far.
On trial there is 24-year-old Shahraban K., who, together with an accomplice, is said to have brutally murdered a young woman who looked identical to the defendant in the summer of 2022 in order to stage her own death. According to the prosecution, she acted out of a motivation similar to that described in “Polizeiruf 110”. Apparently she also speculated that after finding the murdered doppelganger she would be officially declared dead and then be able to start a new life under a different name.
The difference between the two stories is that the real woman presumably wanted to escape the clutches of her strict family with her crime and not, as in “Polizeiruf 110”, the concentrated hatred of a social media community. As the “Augsburger Allgemeine” reported a few days ago, evidence is still being evaluated and witnesses are being heard in the trial, even after more than 25 days of negotiations. According to the newspaper, a verdict is not expected before August 2024.
When adapting this real template for his script, he was primarily concerned with the question of what kind of motivation this was to “put himself above all morals and say, ‘Can I kill a person so that I can exercise my right to my own life can achieve?'” says author Michael Gantenberg. Regardless of the actual murder trial and the jurisprudence, he was drawn to very pragmatic aspects when working on the material: “How do I live with it? How do I plan such an act?” In order to explore these aspects, he put the perspective of the perpetrator in the foreground in his script.