The Insta Murder

A murder worthy of a movie, which shocked the entire community, took place on August 16, 2022, in the Heilbronn area. On that day, 23-year-old Schahraban K., better known as Siri, was brutally involved in a series of events that continue to cause horror to this day. Siri, who had recently moved back in with her parents in Munich, had gone through a turbulent period in her life. Her marriage to Rawan, a Yazidi, had ended due to insurmountable differences. The pressure from her family and the strict religious rules of the Yazidis seemed to be overwhelming her. Against this backdrop, Siri hatched a perfidious plan. She wanted to fake her death in order to leave her family behind and start a new life. The tragedy unfolded when Siri drove from Munich to Ingolstadt in her black Mercedes coupe on that fateful day. A trip to pick up her mail from her former apartment. Late in the evening, when Siri had not yet returned, her worried parents set off for Ingolstadt. What they found there was far beyond what they had feared. Shortly before midnight, they discovered their daughter’s black Mercedes on Peisserstraße, not far from Siri’s apartment. When they looked through the windows, they saw a dead young woman. They were certain that it was Siri and immediately alerted the police. The subsequent autopsy revealed that the dead woman had been killed with over 56 knife wounds. But the real sensation was that the dead woman, who looked strikingly similar to Siri, was not Siri, but 23-year-old Khadidja O. from Eppingen. What was going on? On the night of August 17-18, the police arrested Siri and her accomplice, 25-year-old painter and rapper Sheqir K., alias Cici. Investigators were certain that Siri saw the chance to escape the clutches of the Yazidi clan by faking her death. Her family and husband were devout Yazidis. A marriage contracted according to Yazidi religious rules cannot be dissolved. Both were married under Yazidi law, not German law. During the investigation, it emerged that Siri had specifically searched for a doppelganger on social media and found her in the Algerian beauty blogger Khadidja O. on Instagram. Not only did she have dark curls and was about 1.64 meters tall, but she also looked strikingly similar to Siri. Siri initially lured Khadidja via a fake account with an offer to appear in a music video by rapper Lune. But when Khadidja wrote to her for safety reasons and the rapper had no idea who Khadidja was, she immediately broke off contact. But Siri didn’t give up, luring Khadidja with the prospect of free laser treatment at her hair salon and beauty studio. Khadidja actually agreed to meet up. On August 16, Siri picked up Khadidja in Eppingen together with Cici, a Kosovar man she had recently met at a party through mutual friends. They then drove to the Stöckach forest, where Cici first struck the unsuspecting Khadidja several times in the face with brass knuckles before stabbing her repeatedly with a knife. They then laid her on the back seat and drove to the parking lot of the Kaufland discount store in Bad Rappenau, where Khadidja was finally killed. Cici simply disposed of the murder weapon in the bushes. To date, the murder weapon has not been found. In December 2024, after 53 days of hearings in the so-called “doppelganger” trial, Siri and Cici were each sentenced to life imprisonment by the 1st Criminal Chamber of the Ingolstadt Regional Court for the murder of Khadidja O. In addition, Siri was found to be particularly culpable, which rules out early release on parole after 15 years. Siri was also convicted of attempted incitement to murder against her brother-in-law. Siri had hired a man to kill her brother-in-law for €10,000 because he had opposed the dissolution of her marriage. But this was not Siri’s first attack on her brother-in-law. In February 2018, she had already struck her future husband’s brother in the neck with a stun gun, for which she had been convicted of aggravated assault. The newspapers reported on the eerie irony that a woman who wanted to portray herself as a victim was ultimately the perpetrator. The conviction of Siri and Cici not only led to a legal verdict, but also to an urgent social debate about the influence of social media on the behavior of young people. The question of how far someone is willing to go to lead a completely different life is now being asked. The case reveals the dark side of the digital world and the possibility that someone can become a murderer when they hide their true face behind a mask of lies. While serving their sentences, Siri and Cici remain a warning to society about the dangers of identity loss and the diabolical influence that social media can have on our realities. In the end, the case remains not only an example of a cruel murder, but also a story about the search for identity and the desperate measures some people take to free themselves from their past.