Police said they had found the body of the 11-year-old heir to Germany's Metzler private banking dynasty who was kidnapped last week.
Frankfurt police superintendent Harald Weiss-Bollandt told a news conference the body of Jakob von Metzler was found in a lake some 70 kilometres north-east of Frankfurt.
A Frankfurt local court spokesman said a 27-year-old man, a law student from Frankfurt who is close to the boy's family, had been charged with abduction and murder and transferred to a prison near Frankfurt.
Police said they had found a large sum of money, which could be part of the $2 million ransom demanded within an hour of the last sighting of the boy.
Jakob von Metzler was abducted on his way home from school last Friday in a wealthy Frankfurt suburb.
Police believe he was killed the same day, but they only went public with news of his disappearance on Monday after a ransom payment was made.
Jakob's father Friedrich is the chief of one of Germany's oldest private banks, Metzler, a bank which has passed through 11 family generations dating back to 1674.
He is known as an art lover in the Frankfurt area who has donated millions to the city's museums and art galleries.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Germany was hit by a series of politically motivated kidnappings and killings of prominent bankers and industrialists by the far-left Red Army Faction, the successor to the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
The militant group waged a campaign of assassinations, bombings and kidnappings against the West German establishment and the US military.
Victims of the killings included Dresdner Bank Chief Executive Juergen Ponto, the head of the German employers' association Hanns Martin Schleyer and Deutsche Bank Chief Executive Alfred Herrhausen.
Before the body was found at another location, more than 1,000 police officers combed a forest south of Frankfurt after one suspect said Jakob had been taken to a hut there.
The Metzler case is the highest-profile abduction since 1996 when Jan Philipp Reemtsma, heir to a German tobacco fortune was kidnapped. He was released after 33 days with his family paying a record ransom of $14.3 million.
Also in 1996, Frankfurt businessman Jakub Fiszman was kidnapped and murdered. His kidnappers were paid a ransom sum of about $2 million but had already killed the 40-year-old.
© Reuters
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