On a November day in 2021, a teenager and her ex-boyfriend are said to have lured a 16-year-old friend to the airport in Memmingen, given her ecstasy pills and finally murdered her with multiple stab wounds. Now both are in court. They are silent about the motive.

A 16-year-old is killed in Memmingen – now the murder trial begins. The alleged perpetrators want to refuse to testify in court in the Swabian city. The 26-year-old and the 16-year-old would initially not provide any information, their defense attorneys said at the start of the process before the Memmingen district court. The duo is accused of drugging the teenager near Memmingen Airport on a pretext of knocking them down with a bottle and stabbing them in November 2021. The young people and the man had planned the act beforehand.

The public prosecutor’s office has not yet given a possible motive. The victim and the accused duo were friends and the two suspects were once a couple before the crime, a spokesman for the agency said. If the two German defendants are convicted of murder, the 26-year-old man faces life imprisonment, according to the court. The 16-year-old girl could be sentenced to a maximum of ten years in prison for juvenile criminal law.

According to the public prosecutor, what triggered the crime “cannot be clarified with sufficient certainty”. After the body was found, the police had announced that the 26-year-old was previously known to the investigators – but not because of violent crimes. The parents of the 16-year-old had reported their daughter missing on November 15 after the teenager had not returned home the night before. Investigators are now assuming that the victim was lured to a meeting at Memmingen Airport by the suspect, who is now also 16 years old.

There the teenager gave her capsules with the ecstasy active ingredient MDMA – under the pretext that they were vitamin pills. The then 15-year-old then hit the victim with a vodka bottle. The 26-year-old is said to have killed the young woman lying on the ground with several knife wounds and left her near the airport.

According to the court, 93 witnesses were invited to the 31-day trial. A verdict would therefore not be expected until the beginning of December.