Berlin court sentences Afghan man to life for murdering wife in front of children

A Berlin court jailed an Afghan man for life after ruling he deliberately stabbed his wife to death as their children tried to save her.

A Berlin state court has sentenced a 45-year-old Afghan man to life imprisonment for the murder of his wife, ruling that the killing was deliberate and driven by base motives.

The court found that the man stabbed the mother of his four children five times during an early-morning attack on April 17 in her Berlin apartment, where she had been living separately from him.

Judges said each knife wound was potentially fatal and that the woman died from blood loss after fleeing into the building’s stairwell in a desperate attempt to escape.

The couple’s four children were asleep during the attack but woke up and tried to help their mother, the court said, while the defendant reportedly watched without reacting.

According to the presiding judge, the man acted out of rage and a desire to “punish” his wife, believing he had the right as a husband to discipline her and even take her life.

The court also heard that the defendant told his eight-year-old child after the attack that he would “get them a new mother,” a statement cited as evidence of his lack of remorse.

The couple married in Afghanistan in 2003 and moved to Germany in 2015, where their relationship became increasingly marked by conflict and domestic violence, according to German media reports.

Investigators said the man exercised strict control over his wife, including preventing her from attending German language courses, a pattern commonly highlighted by rights groups as an early warning sign of domestic abuse.

Media reports said the defendant had sought a religious divorce in late 2024 in order to marry another woman, but after failing to do so, he attempted to reconcile with his wife.

Prosecutors initially treated the case as manslaughter, but the court concluded that the crime met the legal threshold for murder with base motives, underscoring Germany’s zero-tolerance stance on gender-based violence.

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