A South Sudanese man who killed an 18-year-old woman by pulling her with him in front of an incoming subway train in Hamburg was flown in directly from Africa by the German state in 2024 as part of a humanitarian admission programme organised by the United Nations (UN).
This was revealed on January 31 by reporters from German newspaper Bild who managed to obtain access to the man’s administrative file.
According to the file the man, whose name was given as Ariop Moses P, was born in the Melut area of South Sudan. After Islamist fighters had killed his parents, he fled to a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya, at the age of 12 where he continued to live for 10 years.
In 2024, UN officials chose the man as one of the candidates for a German resettlement programme.
In 2012, Germany had agreed to take in 6,500 refugees per year who had been classified by the United Nations’ Refugee Agency UNHCR as “especially vulnerable”. The refugees were flown to Germany, received a residence permit immediately and did not have to go through the machinations of Germany’s asylum system.
The programme was discontinued in mid-2025. Since then, pro-asylum NGOs have launched a number of legal challenges with the aim of having German courts order the state to fly in more refugees who were originally accepted under the programme but have not been resettled yet.
Ariop Moses P was one of 514 South Sudanese nationals who came to Germany under the resettlement programme between January 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025. Altogether, Germany took in 6,912 refugees under the programme during that time. The majority were Syrians and Afghans, followed by Sudanese, South Sudanese, Somalians and Congolese.
In 2024, Germany reportedly spent €45 million for flights, medical treatment and initial orientation courses for the participants of the programme.
Most recently, Ariop Moses P was living in a shelter for asylum seekers in Hamburg where his roommates described him as a “ticking timebomb” due to his violent tendencies. “We all called him the big crazy African. He drank a lot of alcohol and was often aggressive,” one neighbour told Bild.
Two days before the subway murder, the man reportedly attacked several German police officers who were called to the scene after the South Sudanese had gone on a rampage inside one of Hamburg’s biggest brothels. He was briefly detained but later released.
Around 10pm on January 29, Ariop Moses P entered the subway station Wandsbek Markt on the U3 metro line. Witnesses described how he was staggering along the platform, apparently drunk, before approaching a “very young” woman.
“I am taking you along”, Ariop Moses P reportedly told the woman, before he pulled her with him in front of an incoming train.
He and the woman were killed instantly. She was later identified as Fatemeh Z, an Iranian citizen. She was reportedly living in a nearby women’s shelter to where she had fled from domestic violence.
