The trial of a 21-year-old man accused of forcing children and teenagers to self-harm and commit sexual acts online, leading to a 13-year-old taking their own life in the United States, has begun behind closed doors in Hamburg.
The trial - which is being held in private due to the age and vulnerability of the victims - marks a precedent in Germany as the first time someone there has gone on trial for murder in a suicide that occurred in a different jurisdiction.
The defendant, who allegedly used the online pseudonym 'White Tiger", faces charges including one count of murder and five counts of attempted murder, according to the prosecution.
He allegedly victimised more than 30 children in hundreds of cases from January 2021 onwards, when he was 16 years old - the reason he is being tried in a juvenile court behind closed doors.
The 21-year-old German-Iranian national living in Hamburg, has been only partially identified as Shahriar J, in line with German privacy rules.
Shahriar J. is accused of having coerced a 13-year-old transgender youth living near the US city of Seattle to die by suicide in January 2022, which the youth live-streamed.
The accused, a student operating from his parental home in a wealthy Hamburg suburb, allegedly used the "White Tiger" pseudonym as part of an online network of abusers known as "764".
The "764" network is named after the Texas zip code of its founder, news weekly Der Spiegel and other media have reported.
The forum shared ultra-violent "gore" content and child sexual abuse material, and its members exchanged tips on luring victims into producing sexually explicit and degrading material and then using it to blackmail them.
'White Tiger' allegedly found vulnerable children and adolescents in online chats or gaming forums, and then developed a bond to groom them.
He is accused of then encouraging them to produce pornographic content and using the material to coerce and extort them, among other allegations.
The suspect was arrested in a police raid on his parents' home on 17 June 2025 and has been held in pre-trial detention since.
No verdict expected this year
The trial is scheduled to run until December, with 82 hearings planned.
No verdict is expected this year.
If found guilty, the defendant can only be sentenced to between six months and 10 years in prison due to the fact that he was a minor at the time the crimes were committed, Judge Marayke Frantzen said shortly before the trial started.
A murder usually carries a 15-year sentence in Germany.
Speaking ahead of the trial, defence lawyer Christiane Yueksel said that the fact that her client was being accused of indirectly committing a murder and other crimes "is a construct that is factually incorrect and cannot be proven".
Prosecutors say the accused made particularly vulnerable children emotionally dependent on him via social media, exploiting this trust to produce child sexual abuse material and escalate the level of harm.
The case was launched after a tip-off from the FBI, which was investigating the death by suicide of the teenage boy in the United States.
Hamburg police arrested the suspect in his parents' home last summer.
An FBI investigator has told Der Spiegel that he had shared the identity of "White Tiger" with German law enforcement in February 2003, more than two years before the suspect's eventual arrest.
The city-state of Hamburg has blamed the time-consuming task of searching through the "large number of data storage devices" seized and the fact that the victims and other perpetrators "mostly live abroad and have sometimes concealed their identities".
The Hamburg regional court has scheduled an initial 82 days of hearings until 17 December.
