GERMANY: Munich police say a 25-year-old Iraqi has confessed to the murder of German fashion designer Rudolph Moshammer.
Mr Moshammer (64) was found strangled in his Munich villa on Friday. He was last seen driving through Munich in his black Rolls-Royce with a young man the previous evening.
"Mr Moshammer didn't have a chance," said Mr Harald Pickert, head of a special commission set up to investigate the murder.
The Iraq-born man, identified only as Herisch A., told of meeting Mr Moshammer near Munich train station shortly before midnight on Thursday before driving back to the designer's villa in the wealthy Munich suburb of Grünwald.
"They agreed a sum of €2,000 for sexual favours which Mr Moshammer apparently didn't pay," said Mr Pickert. "It came to a fight during which the young man grabbed a cable and strangled Mr Moshammer. He admitted searching Mr Moshammer's body afterward before fleeing."
Mr Moshammer's homosexuality was an open secret in Munich society, though the designer himself never spoke about it.
"He was apparently relatively careless about his contacts to young men and invited many of them home," said Mr Pickert.
Herisch A. came to Germany as an asylum-seeker from Iraq in 2001 and is known to Munich police for two counts of grievous bodily harm and rape.
Police took a DNA sample of the young man as a result of these charges, which matched DNA material left at the crime scene.
The suspect was arrested on Saturday evening, 37 hours after the body was found, and confessed after three hours of questioning.