On the afternoon of 15 August 2022, 24-year-old beauty influencer and blogger Sharaban K sat in front of a mirror applying her makeup in a bedroom in Munich, Germany.

It was not an unfamiliar room.

In fact, it was her childhood bedroom — the same room where she had spent her teenage years. Pictures of Sharaban with high school friends were still taped to the walls. Brightly coloured pillows and furniture remained in place, making the room feel like a time capsule from another stage of her life.

But Sharaban was no longer a teenager.

She was 24, married and facing a deeply complicated personal crisis.

Just months earlier, she had separated from her husband and moved back into her parents’ home. Her parents had accepted her return, but they were far from pleased about the circumstances.

What nobody around Sharaban fully understood was that she was already working on an extraordinary plan to escape her old life.

It was a plan that would end with an innocent woman being stabbed more than 50 times.

A Marriage Sharaban Wanted to Escape

Sharaban’s family belonged to the Yazidi community.

Divorce was strongly opposed within the traditional environment surrounding her marriage, and Sharaban faced intense pressure from both her own family and her husband’s relatives to reconcile.

But her marriage was not going well.

Sharaban wanted out.

When her family refused to support a divorce, she simply left her husband and returned to her parents.

Even then, the dispute was far from over.

Her parents allowed her to stay at their home on the understanding that the arrangement was temporary. They expected Sharaban and her husband to eventually repair their marriage and reunite.

Sharaban had no intention of doing that.

No amount of pressure, she had decided, would convince her to return.

There was also something her parents did not know.

Sharaban had met another man.

The Secret Relationship With Shakir

Several weeks earlier, Sharaban had begun a relationship with a young man named Shakir.

When she told her parents she was leaving the house for work, she was sometimes secretly meeting him instead.

Sharaban knew the relationship was new and, given her circumstances, forbidden in the eyes of those around her. Yet she and Shakir apparently believed their connection was genuine.

They wanted to be together.

More importantly, they wanted to find a way for Sharaban to disappear from the marriage and escape the pressure coming from both families.

The couple began working on a plan.

On 15 August, as Sharaban applied her makeup in her childhood bedroom, her phone suddenly buzzed on the table.

She put down her mascara and picked it up.

There was a notification from Instagram.

The direct message had come from the person Sharaban was preparing to meet that evening.

That meeting would be the first major step in the plan she and Shakir had created.

Sharaban finished her makeup, brushed her long black hair and picked up her purse.

She then walked into the living room and told her parents she was going to Ingolstadt, a city roughly an hour away.

She expected to return within a few hours.

Her parents said goodbye.

Sharaban smiled, walked outside, climbed into her Mercedes and drove away.

She did not return that night.

Sharaban Disappears

Several hours after Sharaban left, her mother began sending her text messages.

There was no reply.

She tried calling.

The phone rang and eventually went to voicemail.

Sharaban did not call back.

By about 11pm, her mother was becoming increasingly worried.

There was another reason for her concern.

Sharaban’s husband lived in Ingolstadt.

Her parents had secretly hoped that their daughter might be visiting him that evening. Perhaps, they thought, the couple were finally attempting to repair their marriage.

But Sharaban suddenly disappearing without telling anyone was completely out of character.

Her mother began imagining a darker possibility.

What if Sharaban had met her husband?

What if they had argued?

What if something terrible had happened?

Unable to continue waiting at home, Sharaban’s mother told her husband to get the car keys.

They were going to Ingolstadt to find their daughter.

A Mercedes Beside the River

By around midnight, Sharaban’s parents were driving through Ingolstadt.

Her father was behind the wheel.

They were approaching the area near Sharaban’s husband’s flat and intended to knock on his door, regardless of the late hour.

They simply wanted to know whether Sharaban was there or whether he knew where she had gone.

Then, as they turned onto a quiet street running beside a river, Sharaban’s mother suddenly shouted.

“Stop the car.”

Her husband hit the brakes and pulled over.

She jumped out.

Parked near the riverbank was their daughter’s Mercedes.

For a moment, Sharaban’s mother believed she had found a simple explanation.

Perhaps the car had broken down.

Maybe that was why Sharaban was late.

Maybe that was why she had not answered her phone.

Everything, she told herself, might still be fine.

She rushed to the driver’s side and looked inside.

The two front seats were empty.

Then she looked into the back.

A woman was lying there.

Sharaban’s mother believed she was looking at her daughter.

And the young woman was clearly dead.

A Body Stabbed More Than 50 Times

Within minutes, the quiet street was filled with police officers and emergency vehicles.

Sharaban’s parents stood nearby as officers forced open the locked rear door of the Mercedes.

They removed the woman’s lifeless body.

She was covered in blood.

The body had already begun showing signs of rigor mortis and had become stiff.

For Sharaban’s parents, the scene was devastating.

Police immediately launched a full-scale murder investigation.

Ingolstadt was a relatively small city with a population of around 80,000 people. Murders were rare, and in some years the city recorded none at all.

The apparent killing of a 24-year-old beauty influencer therefore became a major case.

When homicide detectives examined the body, the brutality of the attack was immediately apparent.

The victim had been stabbed more than 50 times.

The wounds were concentrated around the torso and face.

Investigators viewed the extreme violence as possible “overkill” — suggesting the killer might have had a deeply personal motive.

Detectives quickly learned about Sharaban’s troubled marriage.

Her arranged husband lived nearby.

Sharaban’s parents also believed their daughter may have travelled to Ingolstadt to meet him.

To investigators, the husband initially appeared to be an obvious suspect.

Police Question Sharaban’s Husband

Within hours, the body was sent for an official post-mortem examination.

At the same time, the lead detective went to the home of Sharaban’s husband and brought him to the police station for questioning.

Investigators expected a relatively straightforward case.

They thought the husband might have visible injuries from a violent struggle. They also expected him to appear nervous or behave suspiciously.

Instead, he quickly emerged as a weak suspect.

He cooperated fully with police.

He offered to allow investigators to search his home and even volunteered his DNA.

The husband also had an alibi for most of the evening before going to bed.

Technically, nobody could confirm his whereabouts while he was sleeping. But investigators struggled to make the timeline work.

They doubted he could have woken up, left his flat, murdered Sharaban, disposed of her body, cleaned himself and returned home within the available period.

It simply did not seem possible.

Police needed another suspect.

Sharaban’s family, however, could offer little help.

As far as they knew, she had no romantic partner other than her husband.

She rarely socialised outside work.

The main place where Sharaban interacted with new people was online.

As a beauty influencer, she regularly posted photographs and videos and shared fashion advice on social media.

That detail would become critical.

Detectives Turn to Instagram

About eight hours after the body was discovered, on the morning of 16 August, police appealed to the public for information that could help identify a suspect.

The lead detective also began examining Sharaban’s social media accounts.

Just 24 hours later, on the morning of 17 August 2022, the case had effectively been solved.

It had been only around a day and a half since the blood-covered body was discovered in Sharaban’s Mercedes.

But the truth was far stranger than investigators had initially imagined.

The dead woman was not Sharaban.

And Sharaban was not a murder victim.

She was one of the alleged killers.

The Search for a Beauty Influencer

Sharaban and Shakir wanted to run away together.

The obstacle, in their minds, was Sharaban’s marriage and the enormous family pressure surrounding it.

They repeatedly considered ways to free her from her existing life.

Again and again, they reached dead ends.

Then they devised an extraordinary plan.

But they needed a third person.

Specifically, they needed another beauty influencer.

On 15 August, Sharaban had arranged to meet a young woman named Khadidja.

Like Sharaban, Khadidja was active in the beauty and social media world.

She was the person who had sent the Instagram message that appeared on Sharaban’s phone while she was getting ready in her childhood bedroom.

Sharaban and Shakir travelled to Ingolstadt to meet her.

But they did not tell Khadidja the real purpose of the meeting.

Instead, she was allegedly promised beauty products.

The invitation seemed believable.

After all, Sharaban was also a beauty influencer.

When Sharaban and Shakir arrived in the Mercedes, Khadidja was waiting for them.

She was excited.

She climbed into the car.

There were no beauty products waiting for her.

Instead, Sharaban and Shakir produced knives.

The Murder of Khadidja

Inside the Mercedes, Khadidja was stabbed to death.

The attack was extraordinarily violent.

She suffered more than 50 stab wounds to her face and torso.

Once Khadidja was dead, Sharaban and Shakir drove the Mercedes to an area close to Sharaban’s husband’s apartment complex.

They left the car there.

Khadidja’s body remained in the back seat.

Sharaban and Shakir then fled.

Every part of the scene had been designed to create a specific conclusion.

Police were supposed to believe Sharaban was dead.

And suspicion was supposed to fall on her husband.

There was one crucial reason the couple believed the plan could succeed.

Khadidja looked remarkably like Sharaban.

The ‘Doppelgänger Murder’ Plot

Sharaban did not choose a random social media influencer.

She and Shakir had allegedly searched for a woman who physically resembled her.

The plan was to murder the lookalike and leave her body in Sharaban’s car.

Everyone would believe Sharaban was dead.

Sharaban could then potentially assume a new identity and disappear with Shakir, leaving her marriage and family pressures behind.

When they found Khadidja, they believed they had found the perfect victim.

The physical resemblance between the two women was extraordinary.

After Khadidja was killed and her body was placed inside Sharaban’s Mercedes, the deception initially worked.

Even Sharaban’s own parents were fooled.

They looked into the back seat and believed the dead woman was their daughter.

Police initially worked on the same assumption.

Sharaban was the victim.

Her husband was a potential suspect.

From the killers’ perspective, the plan appeared to be succeeding.

But there was one person they could not fool.

The coroner.

The Teeth That Exposed the Plot

During the post-mortem examination, the body appeared remarkably similar to Sharaban.

But there was a problem.

The teeth did not match.

Dental records showed clear differences.

The dead woman could not be Sharaban.

Investigators were suddenly dealing with a completely different mystery.

At around the same time, police began receiving unusual calls from members of the public in Ingolstadt.

People claimed they had seen Sharaban alive.

One person believed they had spotted her at a cafe.

Others reported seeing her walking along the street.

She appeared perfectly fine.

Initially, police treated some of the sightings as unreliable tips.

After all, investigators believed Sharaban had been brutally murdered.

But the dental evidence changed everything.

Social Media Messages Reveal the Truth

Police returned to Sharaban’s social media accounts.

They examined her Instagram activity and discovered messages exchanged with Khadidja.

Investigators then looked at photographs of the dead woman.

The resemblance became obvious.

Suddenly, the pieces of the case began fitting together.

The dental records proved the body was not Sharaban.

Witnesses were reporting sightings of Sharaban alive.

Instagram messages connected her to Khadidja.

Security cameras had also captured Sharaban.

Police tracked her down and arrested her.

Shakir was arrested as well.

Investigators reconstructed what they believed had happened on the night of 15 August.

The woman Sharaban’s parents had mourned was not their daughter.

She was Khadidja — an innocent young woman allegedly lured into a Mercedes with the promise of beauty products because she happened to look like Sharaban.

Life Sentences for Sharaban and Shakir

The case became widely known as Germany’s “doppelgänger murder” because of the extraordinary alleged motive behind Khadidja’s killing.

Investigators concluded that Sharaban and Shakir had planned to fake Sharaban’s death, using the body of a lookalike to convince her family and police that she had been murdered.

For a short time, the deception worked.

Sharaban’s own parents failed to recognise that the blood-covered body in their daughter’s car belonged to somebody else.

Her husband came under immediate suspicion.

But a difference in dental records, combined with social media messages, witness sightings and security footage, destroyed the plan.

Sharaban and Shakir were ultimately found guilty of murder.

Both were sentenced to life in prison.

A plot designed to give Sharaban a new life instead ended with the murder of Khadidja — and life imprisonment for the two people who believed they could make one woman disappear by killing another.