Germany drops charges against Syrian IS suspect accused of rape after lack of evidence

A Syrian refugee who was arrested in Germany on suspicion of belonging to the Islamic State group and raping a woman, has been ordered freed for lack of evidence, prosecutors said Monday.

German federal prosecutors said the arrest warrant for the 31-year-old suspect, identified only as Akram A., on charges of membership in a terrorist organisation and a war crime had been lifted. 

In a statement, the federal prosecutor's office said that "further investigation" had determined that "another course of events may have been possible" in the case of the Syrian suspect.

For this reason, there was no longer enough evidence to keep the suspect in custody.

He was detained in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in February.

At the time, prosecutors alleged that he manned a checkpoint in Syria that sought to prevent citizens from escaping IS-controlled territory.

In early 2016, he was believed to have stopped a woman who was trying to flee with her children, they said.

German federal prosecutors have opened about a dozen investigations concerning alleged war crimes in Syria or Iraq, alongside dozens of cases of suspected membership in militant groups.

The investigations have gained momentum with the arrival of more than one million asylum seekers since 2015, including hundreds of thousands from Syria and Iraq.

Last July, in the first such conviction in Germany, a German militant was sentenced to two years in prison on war crimes charges after posing for pictures in Syria with the severed and impaled heads of two government soldiers.

‘False-flag plots’

The influx of asylum seekers sparked an anti-foreigner backlash and a spate of racist hate crimes in Germany, after early reports falsely claimed refugees were involved in rape crimes in Europe.

But concerns grew in May, after two police detained two German soldiers who posed as Syrian migrant to plot the false-flag assassination of pro-refugee politicians.

The suspect, identified only as Maximilian T., aged 27, was detained from the same Franco-German army base near Strasbourg where his co-conspirator, Franco Albrecht, was also stationed.

Albrecht, 28, was arrested on 26 April for his part in planning the false-flag shooting attack against pro-immigration politicians, which the pair had intended to blame on Muslim migrants and refugees.

He had posed as a fruit-vendor from Damascus to register as a Syrian refugee, despite speaking no Arabic, and was granted a space in a shelter and monthly benefits.