'How can this be?!' Mum's heartbreak as migrant, who assaulted girl, 6, gets soft sentence

The victim’s mother Zaman burst into tears when she heard the verdict and cried out in the courtroom: “How can this be? He should be locked up in a place where he cannot do this again. He destroyed my life on this day.”

The court heard how the 27-year-old man lured the six-year-old girl away to a quiet spot where he could assault her away from prying eyes.

The attacker, Pakistani refugee Tayyab M. told the court in Germany it “didn’t’ matter” to him whether he had sex with a child or an adult – just that the act itself was completed for his gratification.

“I did it, it just happened spontaneously,” he said. “It wasn’t planned.”

When police arrived at the migrant home in the Moabit district of Berlin to arrest the Pakistani suspect her father tried to lunge at him with a knife.

Iraqi Husam al-S., 29, had been in Berlin with his family for four months when he died in a hail of gunfire in a bid to exact revenge on his daughter’s abuser.

Others in the accommodation centre had told him what he had done to his daughter Asiye in the centre on September 27 last year.

As police led Tayyab away in handcuffs the girl’s father lunged at him with a knife screaming: “You will not survive!” 

Syrian refugee called Eyhab, 18, who witnessed what happened, said: “Tayyab was sitting with the little girl and playing her music on his mobile phone.

“That seemed funny to us: the two did not know each other.” He said he then vanished with the little girl.

“Later we found the two of them behind a shed,” he added, saying the little girl was “practically undressed. He was on top of her and I pushed him away.”

Eyhab said he called security guards at the centre in the Moabit section of Berlin and they in turn called police.

As he was being led away the little girl’s father made the lunge for her attacker which cost him his life.

“He ignored several calls to stop, whereupon several policemen opened fire on him,” said a police spokesman. The fatal bullet entered his heart.

Ahmed H., 30, said: “I heard at least three gunshots. He went down. He died in a clinic leaving behind his wife and his three children aged, six, three and ten.”

Bodo Pfalzgraf, the police union leader in Berlin, defended the officers who killed him – now at the centre of a probe – saying: “The officers had to prevent lynch mob justice and also protect themselves in a life-threatening situation.”

Judges at the trial said they handed down a mild sentence – agreed with by the prosecution – because the abuser had confessed his crime. Admitting to his actions spared the child from having to give evidence against him.

But a child psychologist had quizzed her beforehand. He told judges that she said the man bit her vagina after stripping her as she toyed with hius mobile phone,

Judges said the attack was “very short” and in such cases suspended sentences were the norm.

The abuser came to Berlin in 2015 as a political refugee. He applied to de-register from his asylum home in Berlin to another city in Germany following his conviction.

It is unclear whether Germany intends to deport him back to his homeland.