A new scandal emerged in the death of Amed Ahmed, a young Afrin man, who died in October 2018 in the hospital where he had been taken from the cell where he was unjustly held in Kleve. The young man had been was seriously injured in the fire that broke out in his cell. His family and lawyers learned that the file held by the police when Ahmed was taken into custody was deleted.

The North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) State Police Department has put the "automatic" deletion of the file, however, it appears that Amed's investigation file was deleted despite the decision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the State of NRW stating that it should not.

After the incident, Amed's family filed a criminal complaint against the police through lawyers, while MPs from the NRW Assembly made harsh criticism of the state's security units. SPD's Group deputy president, Sven Wolf, said the time when the file was deleted was interesting.

Greens MP Stefan Engstfeld added that it was curious that the file was deleted despite the order from the Ministry of Interior. "We will never retrieve the original file again," said Engstfeld, who is also a member of the investigative commission established in the parliament.

Oliver Kehrl, the spokesperson of the ruling party Union of Christian Democrats (CDU) in NRW State, said that the deletion of the file, which he described as "sad," "strengthened the conspiracy theories of the opposition."

An Investigation Commission was set up in the NRW State Assembly to investigate whether the police deliberately detained Amed Ahmed – who was not a wanted person - and how the fire broke out in the prison.

What happened

In July 2018, NRW police detained an Afrin youth called Amed Ahmed at the request of the Hamburg police. In his statement to the police, 26-year-old Ahmed tried to explain that he had never been to Hamburg and had nothing to do with the charges brought against him by the police. However, Ahmed was not able to convince the police, the prosecutor or the prison administration that he was not the person they were looking for.

On the evening of 17 September 2018, Ahmed was seriously injured in the fire that broke out in the cell in Kleve prison, near Düsseldorf, where he was held.

While Ahmed was in a coma at the hospital, security units widened their investigation and found that the person Hamburg police sought for theft was in fact another refugee, named Malili Amedy Guira.

The Kurdish youth, Ahmed, who did not resemble the Malian refugee at all, was unfairly kept in prison for 2 months. Amed Ahmed passed away on 5 October 2018, at the hospital in Bochum, where he was being treated. He died shortly after it was found that he had been imprisoned innocent. The investigation initiated by the prosecutor against the police officers who detained Ahmed was also closed after a while.

Kurdish institutions and refugee organizations in Germany, on the other hand, linked Ahmed's detention, his death in the prison fire in unclear circumstances, and the closure of the file to the racist approach of the security units to Kurdish hostility.