Weak punishments of as little as one year and eight months, suspended, for a migrant rape gang which targeted a 13-year-old girl have sparked outrage in Germany.
Eight migrants aged 14 to 17 and holding Bulgarian citizenship had sexually harassed the victim at a swimming pool in a Velbert, North Rhine-Westphalia, and dragged her into the woods as she was making her way home in the early evening, reports Der Spiegel.
Two of the six defendants — two more suspects will be tried separately after they have been extradited from Bulgaria, where they fled with their families after the attack — took turns raping the young teen while the others watched, at least one of them filming the assault on a mobile phone.
The migrants then brought her to a parking lot several hundred yards away, where the same two gang members raped her again, and then back to the woods — where, fortunately, they were interrupted by a walker who happened to be in the area.
The young girl was forced to testify at length in court as a result of one of the main defendants having “denied the act until the end and claimed that the sex was consensual”, according to a court spokesman — a claim dismissed as ridiculous by the judge.
“It’s absurd to imagine that a 13-year-old girl wants to voluntarily have sex with so many men,” they said.
Nevertheless, and despite the prosecutor having asked that the two rapists should receive sentences of seven years and five years and eight months — not very long in absolute terms, but severe by German standards — they were handed terms of only four years and nine months and four years.
One of their accomplices received just three years, while the remaining gang members were effectively allowed to walk free from court, with their sentences of two years and one year and eight months being suspended.
The victim’s lawyer, Anke Tillmanns-Larisch, said the youngster has “withdrawn inside herself and only goes outside with company” since the attack.
Crimes of this sort have been becoming more common across Europe, particularly since the onset of the migrant crisis in 2015, when German leader Angela Merkel’s unilateral decision to issue an open invitation to ‘refugees’ led to more than a million people flooding across the European Union’s common external border in search of a better life in the generous welfare states in the west and north of the bloc.
One particular case in Sweden bears eerie similarities to this most recent one involved a group of migrant men not only recording but livestreaming the rape of a young woman on Facebook, with the cameraman receiving only six months for his participation in the crime and even appealing the term on grounds he did not understand his actions constituted an offence.
The Swedish authorities decided not to pursue deportation proceedings against those involved.
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