Suspect re-arrested in 2022 murder of Limburg teen
The police arrested a 25-year-old man from Sittard on Monday for the murder of 19-year-old Xavier Durlinger in 2022. This man, Merlijn C., was previously arrested in 2023, but was released again due to insufficient evidence. He was remanded into custody for 14 days on Thursday, the Public Prosecution Service (OM) reported.
Xavier’s mother reported him missing on 12 May 2022. The teenager’s body was found on the Kllenberg in Sittard a few days later, on 19 May 2022. He had been stabbed to death.
The police launched a large-scale investigation, questioning dozens of witnesses, examining hundreds of hours of camera footage, and testing trace evidence. Investigators carried out searches and appealed for information on the program Opsporing Verzocht multiple times.
In April 2023, the police arrested Merlijn C. for the first time. The man had an appointment with Xavier on the evening that he was killed. C. claimed that Xavier never showed. According to 1Limburg, the two had some sort of dispute. The police also found blood spatter from the victim in C.’s backpack and reported that the man gave conflicting statements about the blood and the route he took that evening.
He spent several months in pre-trial detention until the court released him in September 2023 due to insufficient evidence to keep him in custody. He always denied having anything to do with the murder.
The police arrested him again on Monday due to new investigation information. “The most important new information comes from an image comparison study carried out by the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI),” the OM said. The study supports that C. was caught on surveillance camera footage cycling near where Xavier’s body was found on Kollenberg shortly after the presumed time of the murder.
Footage also shows C. cycling on Jozef Israëlsstraat in Sittard later that night. In June 2022, the police found Xavier’s cap and his hip bag in the bushes along that street.
