The girl who invented the story about her disappearance spent the night in question of January 11 with a friend, Berliner Zeitung reports citing a prosecutor's office official. Due to problems at school, the girl obviously did not dare go home to her parents and chose to stay over at her 19-year-old friend’s.
There was no evidence of a sexual offense or a man's sexual contact with the girl. The man is therefore determined as a witness. The girl herself still say hardly anything new to the case.
Read alsoDW: Germany warns Russia against using teen 'rape' case for political endsBerlin's Interior Senator Frank Henkel (CDU) declared: "The new developments clearly debunk the propaganda that was in the last days connected with this case."
As reported earlier, the 13-year-old Russian-speaking girl from Marzahn-Hellersdorf had disappeared on the morning of January 11 for 30 hours and then told her family of an abduction and rape by a group of southern-looking men.
In the weeks after the reappearance of the girl, there was great excitement among many Russian-Germans in Berlin. Conspiracy theories and xenophobic propaganda against refugees were spread on the Internet. Russian media heated up the atmosphere.
The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the German authorities to have concealed the case for long. According to the authorities, the girl also has German citizenship.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier criticized Russia saying there was no justification to use the case for "political propaganda" in order to heat up the already difficult migration debate in Germany.
Interior Minister Henkel stressed: "Political pressure from abroad will not cause that we change anything about our constitutional principles.”
