One of two Afghan asylum seekers accused of murdering their sister for being too Western has claimed that killing her was “an accident”.

Accused Yousuf Sayed H., 27, told a court in Berlin, Germany, on 26th January that he alone is responsible for his 34-year-old sister Maryam’s death.

Mum-of-two Maryam was throttled, stabbed, hacked to pieces, and wrapped in duct tape.

Her body parts were then stuffed into a suitcase and driven 340 miles to a remote spot.

Yousuf and brother Mahdi, 23, are both accused of killing her and burying her in a shallow grave.

Grim CCTV video footage of the brothers shows them carrying a bag containing Maryam’s dismembered body through a German railway station.

Now Yousuf claims the killing was an accident.

He told the court in Berlin: “I’m very sorry. It was an accident. I love my sister and have always loved her.”

He claimed he had choked his sister in an argument over her un-Islamic lifestyle and had only dismembered her because her body would not fit in the bag.

The brothers, say prosecutors, had lured their sister out of the safety of a refuge deliberately to kill her on 13th July 2021.

Mahdi – he claims – had been outside smoking when Maryam was killed but then helped him dispose of her body.

Bizarrely, Mahdi’s legal team is seeking his acquittal from murder charges and up to EUR-40,000 (GBP-35,000) compensation for nearly two years in custody.

A third brother – also believed to have taken part in the killing – hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial.

But prosecutors want both surviving brothers to be jailed for life.

Roland Weber, a lawyer representing Maryam’s children, said: “It was about power and control over women.”

He added: “She was a mother of two children. The marriage had failed. She wanted to lead an independent life in Germany and find a new partner herself.

“She went out, dared to drink alcohol, took off her headscarf. But according to her family, she shouldn’t be entitled to these small freedoms. Maryam was terrified of her brothers.

“She was controlled, hit, kicked. She had to serve, shop, cook. And then an 11-year-old stands there in tears with a doll in her arms and asks, ‘Why is Mama dead?’

“And her teenage brother asks with a stony face, ‘Why did my uncles do that?’

“They deliberately took the mother from these children, which is particularly despicable.”

But Yousuf’s lawyers are requesting a “maximum” of five years in prison, claiming that “it was an accident, a bodily injury with a tragic outcome, ultimately an accident.

“Nothing was planned, it was not an expression of striving for power.”

Yousuf had previously told the court of Maryam: “She was angry with our parents, she used bad words that made me angry. I found that disrespectful.”

He told how he had put his hand over her mouth, grabbed her shoulders, “fought” her, and finally put her head under his arm.

He also told how, in a rage, he had squeezed his sister’s neck tightly for one to two minutes until her body became heavy and she collapsed to the ground.

But he claimed to the court: “I thought she had passed out. I didn’t want to kill her.”

Yousuf recounted how his sister had failed to start breathing or moving again, telling the court: “Then I realised she had died.”

He then told how he had later chopped her up with a knife, wrapped her body parts in duct tape, and stashed them into a new suitcase.

He claimed in his confession that his brother was blameless, telling the court that Mahdi had entered the room just after the killing and asked what was going on.

Yousuf told the court: “Mahdi wanted to call a doctor.”

But he claimed he had then threatened his brother against seeking help.

The brothers are alleged to have killed Maryam because she had shamed her family’s ‘honour’.

She had divorced her abusive husband, whom she had been forced to marry aged just 16, and had met another man in the German capital.

She had also enjoyed the western lifestyle, with earlier reports telling how she had ditched her headscarf.

Her brothers had been hounding her weeks before the killing and had forbidden her from meeting other men, the court was told.

They had quickly turned violent towards her, as confirmed by witnesses – including Maryam’s then-14-year-old son and then-10-year-old daughter – during the trial.

Following their arrest, they had denied having anything to do with their sister’s death to police.

But Yousuf’s partner, who lives in Bavaria, led investigators to the exact spot where Maryam’s remains had been buried.

The knife used to chop the victim up – which the brothers had allegedly thrown in a bin – was never recovered.

A verdict is expected on 9th February.