Berlin (AFP) – A 13-year-old Russian-German girl who ignited
an international row by saying she was raped by migrants was actually
sleeping at a friend’s house on the night in question, Berlin
prosecutors said Friday.

Authorities in the German capital said their
investigation had concluded that the account of the girl’s kidnapping
and sexual assault this month by three men from “southern countries” had
no basis in fact, despite high-level Russian claims to the contrary.
“Using
data from her broken mobile phone, we were able to access information
about a young German man aged 19 — an acquaintance of the 13-year-old
girl,” prosecutor’s office spokesman Martin Steltner told AFP.
“The young girl wanted to hide at his house because she was having problems in school.”
The
incident has exacerbated tensions between Germany and Russia already
strained over the conflict in Syria and European Union sanctions imposed
on Moscow over Ukraine.

Friday’s
findings “clearly defuse the propaganda that had developed recently
around this case,” Frank Henkel, the German capital’s top security
official, said in a statement.
Without mentioning Moscow, he
said Germany is a “state based on the rule of law” and no “political
pressure from abroad” would alter its “constitutional principles”.
The teenager went missing on January 11, reportedly on her way to school.
She
subsequently returned and filed a police report, with her parents
telling investigators she was kidnapped by three apparently foreign men
at a railway station in eastern Berlin and taken to a flat where they
raped and beat her.
German police last week rejected the teenager’s account but nevertheless passed the case to the prosecutor’s office.
Berlin
prosecutors had said there was no evidence that the girl was forced to
have sexual relations but opened a probe against at least one man on
possible statutory rape charges stemming from a separate incident since
she was under the age of consent (14 in Germany).
Steltner said
Friday that investigators now believe that the girl had had sex with two
men in their 20s, “a Turkish citizen and a German of Turkish origin”
who may now be charged with abusing a minor.
The incident came to
light with Germany in an uproar over a spate of New Year’s Eve sexual
assaults on women in Cologne allegedly carried out, for the most part,
by Arab and North African men, that was initially met with silence from
the police.
Last year, nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers arrived
in Germany, most of them from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, with
Chancellor Angela Merkel under increasing pressure over her welcoming
stance toward refugees fleeing war.