The chilling case of an Instagram doppelgänger killing took a twist — the suspect tried to kill before, prosecutors say

• A German woman was accused of killing her lookalike last year in a plot to fake her own death.
• The woman, Sharaban K., was charged with an additional crime on Tuesday, prosecutors said.
• Sharaban tried to hire someone to kill a relative one month before, but the plan failed, they said.

A German woman accused of killing her doppelgänger to fake her own death last year had attempted to hire someone to murder a relative just a month earlier, prosecutors told Insider.

Sharaban K, a 23-year-old German-Iraqi woman, is accused of searching social media for a lookalike and then killing the doppelgänger on August 16, 2022, as part of a scheme to fake her own death, German prosecutors said.

A male friend, identified as Sheqir K., is suspected of being an accomplice to the crime, they added. 

But Veronika Grieser of the Ingolstadt state prosecutor's office told Insider on Thursday that cell phone evidence indicates that in mid-July last year, Sharaban K. made a payment to somebody else to kill one of her relatives.

The plan, however, failed to materialize, Grieser added.

"According to the investigations carried out so far, the other suspect had assured [Sharaban K.] that he would carry out the plan but did not pursue it further despite repeated requests," she said.

Grieser did not disclose who the relative was, or reveal the identity of the person who received the payment.

But she told Insider that an additional charge of attempted incitement to murder was handed down to Sharaban K. on Tuesday.

Sharaban K. and Sheqir K. are both charged with first-degree murder, with the pair facing life in prison if convicted, German tabloid Bild reported. Both remain in custody. The victims and accused are referred to by only their first names and an initial, as is customary in the German legal system.

On August 16, 2022, police found a female body with 50 stab wounds in the trunk of a Mercedes car in Ingolstadt, Germany. They initially identified the victim as Sharaban K.

But an autopsy later identified the body as that of Khadidja O, also 23, who was an Algerian beauty influencer living in Heilbronn, Germany. Police said the pair had a "striking resemblance" to each other.

In what a local police spokesperson told Bild was a "spectacular twist," Sharaban K was later named as one of two suspects in the murder. The press dubbed it the "doppelgänger murder."

Grieser previously told Bild that Sharaban K had wanted to go into hiding "due to internal disputes with her family." 

The investigations by the public prosecutor's office are still ongoing, but are at an "advanced stage," Grieser told Insider.