A 39-year-old Somalian asylum seeker who fled Sweden after attempting to kill his wife with an axe has been found and arrested in the Austrian capital of Vienna.
The 39-year-old Somalian had carried out the attack on his wife in June of last year in the remote municipality of Torpsbruk. He hit his wife with the axe repeatedly and only stopped after waking up their children and then fled, Kronen Zeitung reports.
The victim was rushed to a hospital shortly after the attack and managed to survive thanks to emergency surgery. Police lost track of the Somalian man who then turned up in Austria a month later with no form of identification and claimed that he was actually 29-years-old and requested asylum.
He told Austrian authorities that he had fled from Somalia and had lost his identification documents while he was on his way to Europe.
One of the reasons he was not caught earlier was that his fingerprints were not in the Swedish database as he had not claimed asylum there. Interpol and Europol put out international warrants for his arrest and posted his picture on the website Europe’s Most Wanted but had few leads on his location.
By January of 2017, the Somalian had gained asylum status in Austria and was living in a flat with his new girlfriend in the heavily migrant-populated Vienna district of Favoriten.
Earlier this week police from the special Cobra unit was able to confirm his identity and placed the 39-year-old under arrest for attempted murder.
In recent years there have been many cases of asylum seekers murdering their wives. In one particularly brutal case, a Chechen migrant murdered his wife by first throwing her out of a window and then stabbing her to death afterwards.
In another case, a Syrian woman was killed by her husband after he beat her to death following an argument between the pair. The investigators in the case were shocked to find out that the couple’s children had been present when the murder took place and had regularly witnessed the man beating his wife in the past.