Enlarge image
Police officers in a forest near Kipfenberg (2021)
Photo: - / dpa
In the case of Sonja Engelbrecht from Munich, who disappeared 27 years ago and was presumably murdered, the police have been looking for traces again since Monday with a large contingent.
A police spokesman said that around a hundred emergency services were on the move in a forested area near Kipfenberg in the Upper Bavarian district of Eichstätt.
Since the search for bones of the corpse or other traces should also take place in the area of the rock faces in the Altmühltal, specialists from an alpine task force are involved in the operation.
The search operation is expected to last four days.
A femur of the young woman was discovered in a forest near Kipfenberg in the summer of 2020.
With a DNA analysis, the bone was assigned to the missing person last year.
When the bone was found, the police were made aware that the body had probably been buried in the forest around a hundred kilometers north of the state capital.
As early as November 2021, more than a hundred police officers were looking for further traces near Kipfenberg.
"As a result, the searches have so far not led to the discovery of objects relevant to the crime," it said at the time.
Overall, the criminal police still have only a few clues in the case.
The investigators had already announced in winter that they wanted to search again on site when it was warmer again.
The police have offered a reward of 10,000 euros for information that helps solve the case.
In April 1995, the then 19-year-old disappeared in Munich without a trace.
According to the police, Engelbrecht's partner last saw her alive at night at the Stiglmaierplatz tram stop in Munich.
Afterwards there was speculation that the young woman could have been kidnapped and killed or sold to traffickers.
In the spring of 2020, the skeletonized bodies of a young couple from Ingolstadt, who had been missing since 2002, were also discovered in a forest in the market town of Kipfenberg, which has around 6,000 inhabitants.
However, the investigators assume that there is no direct connection between the murder cases and that the spatial and temporal coincidence of the two discoveries is coincidental.
wit/dpa