FAKED NEWS
Jan and Irina were famous in Frankfurt as victims of Muslim migrant sex fiends. But it was all a lie. Now Irina’s dead, and Jan’s been arrested for her brutal murder.
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| Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast |
BERLIN
The body of a mother in her late twenties was found in a park in
Frankfurt earlier this month. Irina A. owned her own real estate
company. Originally from Moldova, recent photographs show a pretty woman with swept-back bleached blond hair, a no-nonsense expression, and a bling Star of David pendant. One of the last pictures that she posted on her Instagram account carried the hashtag #theworldismine.
Her
body had been dragged into the grass, and her face had been mutilated
beyond recognition. There were “around 20 stab wounds,” according to the
state attorney’s spokeswoman. Her purse was missing, and, according to a
police report, so was her jewelry.
The man who was arrested two
days later for Irina A.’s murder is a 50-year-old starsucker and
financially flailing restaurateur named Jan Mai, who had persuaded her
to invest in one of his clubs two years earlier.
The German public already knew his name, and hers, in a particular context.
Last year, in an attempt to get some free publicity, Mai had the idea to offer Germany’s best-selling newspaper, Bild, a story about “50 Arab men” who stormed into his bar on New Year’s Eve 2016, groped “the girls,” and stole their jackets.
Bad Publicity
The resulting double-page spread was headlined “Sex Mob Rages on
Frankfurt Restaurant Strip,” and Irina A. was the star witness. She had
been groped everywhere, she told the Bild reporter: “I was lucky I was wearing tights.”
The story harked back to the attacks in Cologne
during the New Year’s Eve celebrations in 2015, where gangs of
predominantly Moroccan and Algerian men without work permits gathered at
the central train station and intentionally encircled women, cutting
them off from their friends.
Some of these young toughs had been making trouble around the city for years. But the Cologne incident was incendiary,
coming as it did at the height of the refugee crisis, when Germany
Chancellor Angela Merkel had decided to allow a million people into the
country, most of them from Muslim backgrounds, many of them fleeing the
war in Syria.
The impact was that much worse because at first the mainstream media appeared intent on ignoring it.
“A cartel of silence” is how one conservative politician criticized the
German media for not covering the Cologne sexual assaults straight
away. When they did, the impression remained, paradoxically, that it was
taboo to talk about the origins of the accused.
But since then, Bild, in particular, has devoted a disproportionate amount of coverage to crimes by foreigners, according to a recent study. (The tabloid is very righteous. It is run by an editor who, as Der Spiegel revealed last month, once coordinated the character assassination of a female colleague after she accused Bild’s former editor in chief of raping her at a party at his lake house.)
“A
woman who stands up and says ‘I was a victim of sexual violence’—that’s
an accusation that you have to take seriously,” as one Frankfurt
reporter said after Irina A. appeared on the cover of Bild.
Except that Irina A. was not even in Frankfurt that night—she spent New
Year’s Eve in Belgrade. And that is one of the reasons both Jan Mai and
Irina A. were due to report in court next month for falsely reporting a
crime.
By the time the Bild editors apologized for publishing fake news, the story had gone viral. Breitbart covered it.
And it also resonated with the kind of Facebook groups in Germany that
rail against neighborhood asylum homes (“No to the home!”) or laud “The Patriots of Central Saxony,”
a small group of leather-clad middle-aged men who record themselves
waving Germany flags and strumming guitars while they promise to die so
that “Germany must not sink.” Now, more than one year later, many of
these mini-protests have died down, while new movements have popped up.
Men at the ‘Women’s March’
A few months ago, hundreds of men came out on the streets of Berlin
with signs that read “Headscarf ban for Germany” and “Stop
Islamization.” The march was advertised as a “Women’s march” against,
among other things, “the sneaking introduction of Sharia law.” Few women
showed up. But it hardly mattered, because, according one prominent
far-right male publicist, “We are the real feminists.”
The men
had been told to walk behind the women, so that they could “secure” the
path from the cozy and increasingly gentrified Kreuzberg neighborhood to
the green lawn in front of the Federal Chancellery. Women who “were
afraid to come out here alone,” according to one marcher, had requested
this. On the day, the men took over the front of the crowd, too, in
order to “send a signal” to any counterprotesters who might be
undercover antifa activists. (Like one elderly punk called Arne who had
come into the city by night bus and was now standing by the
“International Women’s Space” stall and singing along to the Scissor
Sisters.)
And when the counter-protesters did scream “Nazi” and
“You’re giving me a headache” at them, the men with the signs did not
look ashamed. Some held onto the hands of their children. They caught
sympathetic looks from several police officers, because at least they
weren’t adding to the law enforcement workload by covering their faces
like some of the leftist kids.
“I liked it!” the enthusiastic
organizer of the “women’s march,” an ex-banker who now works as a
research assistant for the far right Alternative für Deutschland Party,
told us. Specifically, she liked it “that German men said we won’t allow
it.” Many of the men who came did not have wives or daughters, she
said. “But they were there to say: I am a German man and I stand here
for women in Germany.”
Big Muscles
Jan Mai is a German man with big muscles and rumored connections to a
motorcycle gang. He reportedly likes fighting dogs and is annoyed by
“social romantics.” For this guy, things were still looking good when a
private TV network came to visit a few days after the Bild “Sex Mob” story.
“They streamed inside here,” Mai said, speaking
confidently on breakfast television about the Muslim horde, his blue
eyes opened wide: “They put on the jackets of the guests and marched
outside with the jackets. They grabbed the girls from behind.”
After
the publicity plan backfired, Jan Mai shut down the bar. Irina had
played along, but now she wanted her investment money back, according a
“close friend” quoted by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. That’s allegedly why she met Mai in the park on Wednesday night.
Mai
had recently come back from a holiday to Dubai with his two teenage
sons. The family had flown business class, and Mai claimed to have
plenty of money. Apart from his bars and clubs, he bragged about owning
600 apartments. But when he and Irina argued about her money, Mai
allegely took out a knife he’d brought along and started stabbing away,
according to the police (his blood was found at the crime scene).
Aleksey
Antoni was a friend of Irina A.’s from the time they went to primary
school together in Moldova, where they both were born and grew up. After
graduation, she moved to Frankfurt and he to London. When they talked,
she told him about the bar and her responsibilities in it. She never
mentioned Mai. Antoni says he only knew Mai’s existence from photos that
Irina A. was tagged in online.
“Irina was like a sister to me,“
Antoni told The Daily Beast. “We are alike: when we want something we go
and get it. I wanted to come in August to visit her, to see everything
with my own eyes, but I was too late.”
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