Germany’s immigration angst deepens

Since 2015, the influx of about 1.4 million Middle East and North African migrants into Germany — almost all of them Muslim — has destabilized the nation’s politics and society.

One of them, Ali Bashar, an Iraqi said to be 20 years old, was arrested on Friday in Kurdistan, the prime suspect in the rape and killing of Susanna Maria Feldman, a case that has turned into a German cause célèbre and global news.

Susanna Feldman was a 14-year-old Jewish girl from Mainz. When she disappeared in May, her distraught mother mounted a major social media campaign. Unchaperoned, Feldman seems to have struck up a friendship with Ali Bashar a while back at a refugee center on the outskirts of Wiesbaden, where he lived with his parents and five siblings.

Last week, Susanna was found strangled near railway lines close to the refugee center. An unnamed 13-year-old witness had tipped police off…

The tragic incident comes when chancellor Angela Merkel’s critics are attacking malfeasance in asylum cases and broader migrant policy. German political parties are split internally over immigration. Merkel herself has come out of the disputes deeply damaged. After failed September 2017 elections, it took her almost six months to form a coalition government…

By the time German authorities realized Bashar’s connection to the murder, Ali and seven other family members had boarded a plane in Düsseldorf with false identification papers apparently issued by the Iraqi Consulate. They paid cash for a one-way fare to Istanbul, and headed for Kurdistan, planning to vanish. Able security forces, cooperating with Germany, soon captured the fugitive, who admitted his guilt, and was returned to Wiesbaden over the weekend…

For German immigration restrictionists, each fresh report of migrant wrongdoing such as this is a reminder that something’s deeply amiss. The irony a so-called asylum seeker would flee homeward for cover after a heinous crime has not been lost on the public.