A soldier has been attacked with a fence post by a migrant on the Austrian border, in yet another incident of migrant violence.
The soldier from the 23rd Battalion of Vorarlberg was attacked on Monday afternoon while patrolling the Austrian border with Slovenia. He suffered cuts to the face and had to be treated at a local hospital, according to the Kronen Zeitung.
Thousands of migrants have travelled across the border between the two countries in the hope of travelling on to Germany. Around 85,000 migrants have poured into Slovenia in the past couple of weeks after Hungary closed its border with Serbia and Croatia.
Austria is now considering building “technical barriers” along its border with Slovenia, with Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner saying a fence may be needed to maintain public order. Although she insisted there was no plan to build a fence “around Austria”, the Slovenian border is becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
This weekend, around 600 people marched in a protest calling for stronger controls along the frontier. Breitbart London reported that the protesters chanted slogans calling for the resignation of Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann and demanded the government start work on the fence immediately.
The decision to build a fence is a major U-turn for the Austrian government, with Mr Faymann previously comparing Hungary’s border fences to Nazism. Ms Mikl-Leitner has even spoken of her distaste for the word “fence”, telling journalists: “If it is possible to avoid the word ‘fence’ from a technical point of view, then that’s fine by me.”
Her reticence is not shared by the mayor of Graz, however, who told journalists he wanted to ban all male migrants from entering the country and only let in women and children.
Siegfried Noglof of the Austrian People’s Party said: “For [families of women and children] we have a place, but the men who want to come for help, we must make it clear to them that here, there is no capacity.”