( Sun )
AN AMERICAN woman is facing up to 10 years in jail after allegedly accidentally stabbing a man to death when he groped her at a train station.
The 20-year-old was reportedly standing on an escalator at a station in Germany when the assailant grabbed her backside earlier this year.
After turning around to confront him, the woman is alleged to have pulled out a folding knife and made stabbing motions toward him.
In the resulting struggle, she is accused of stabbing the man, a 64-year-old originally from Eritrea, in the heart.
He died within seconds.
An autopsy showed the man died from a knife wound to the heart, deputy chief prosecutor Dominik Ludwig said in a statement.
The woman then left the scene leading to a police search for her.
She later turned herself in at a nearby police station.
The woman, who lives in the city of Kaiserslautern in the southwestern German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, has been charged with causing bodily harm resulting in death.
If found guilty she faces up to 10 years in prison at a youth court.
According to German and American officials, the woman was born in Germany but is an American citizen.
She is not affiliated with the US military, which still has some 40 bases in Germany, a legacy of the Cold War.
The American, who has not been named, claimed she was acting in self-defense after being assaulted on June 29 this year.
Reports say the man grabbed her arm holding the knife and as she tried to free herself, she stabbed him in the chest "during the same movement."
Prosecutors say the woman claims she was trying to keep the man - who also hasn't been named - at a distance.
Security footage of the stabbing also reportedly suggests the intention wasn't to kill the man.
For this reason, prosecutors have charged her with bodily harm rather than with murder or manslaughter.
But they still argue she went beyond the grounds of self-defense.
"The public prosecutor's office does not believe that the stabbing was justified by self-defense," a spokesperson for the prosecutor's office told the German tabloid Bild.
Police have since released the woman.
A youth court is due to decide whether or not to accept the charge against her.
Investigators are looking to determine why the woman was carrying a knife at the time.
They are also looking for additional witness testimony and forensic evidence connected with the case.
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