[NYTimes] It was a gruesome murder: A 14-year-old girl was raped and strangled, her body buried under brushwood in a secluded area near the railway tracks near her hometown in western Germany.
But the fact that the chief suspect is an Iraqi asylum seeker has turned a terrible crime into political dynamite.
On Friday, the case dominated the German news media and became the latest cudgel for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s opponents and, some predicted, a potential turning point in the migration debate in a country where some 10,000 asylum seekers still enter every month.
There is no doubt the murder has given ammunition to those who want to get tougher, led by the far right, who are waging a widening challenge to what they contend is the government’s botched handling of asylum cases.
The murder suspect, identified as Ali Bashar, a 20-year-old Iraqi, arrived in Germany in October 2015, shortly after Ms. Merkel opened the borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants. He was rejected in late 2016, but was allowed to stay in the country while his appeal was pending.
Last Saturday, he and seven other members of his family managed to flee the country, boarding a plane in Düsseldorf with papers apparently issued by the Iraqi Consulate but featuring false names, after paying cash for a one-way fare to Istanbul and then on to Iraq, where he has since been arrested.
The case is not linked to the scandal at the German migration agency, but together they have played into fears that Ms. Merkel’s government is not in control of the migrant situation.
The scandal at the migration agency has been building for weeks since state prosecutors began a criminal investigation into alleged corruption at a regional office in Bremen, in northern Germany. The investigation was recently broadened to include at least 10 other offices with above-average rates of granting asylum.
Critics of Ms. Merkel, led by the nativist Alternative for Germany party, now the largest opposition party, have been calling for a parliamentary inquiry into her migration policy. The proposal is gaining traction with other parties, too, and could threaten Ms. Merkel’s uneasy coalition with the Social Democrats.
On Thursday night, after reports of the killing, Alice Weidel, the deputy leader of the AfD, accused Ms. Merkel of sharing responsibility in the death of the girl, who has been identified by the authorities as Susanna Feldmann, and called for her entire cabinet to step down. 
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