According to information from the Austrian Interior Ministry, asylum home employees face threats of murder from angry asylum seekers with at least 15 serious incidents occurring in the last year.
The information came in response to a question posed to populist Interior Minister Herbert Kickl from David Stögmüller of the Green party, Kronen Zeitung reports.
Many of the asylum seekers have specifically made threats to staff in order to be transferred to a different facility, according to the report. A case in the town of Maria Enzersdorf saw an asylum seeker threaten an employee with an iron bar because he wanted to be moved to another location.
Other incidents have seen quite different motivations for the death threats including in Salzburg where a migrant threatened to kill an employee over food and in Bergheim where two migrants became so angry at the lack of internet access that they threatened to kill one of the care workers.
Last year in Italy, a similar case occurred when a 26-year-old Senegalese asylum seeker physically attacked an asylum home worker because the home had not listened to his repeated requests to install wireless internet.
Some of the cases in Austrian asylum homes also turned physical with several employees claiming that migrants had tried to intimidate them by pushing their chests up to them and to security guards. At least one worker had been injured as a result of a conflict with a migrant.
While none of the attacks listed caused serious or life-threatening injuries, several asylum care workers in various European countries have been killed by migrants since the height of the migrant crisis in 2015.
In 2016, Somalian asylum seeker Youssaf Nuur murdered care worker Alexandra Mezher, stabbing the 22-year-old young woman to death, and a similar case occurred in Germany the following year when a Nigerian migrant stabbed asylum worker Soopika P. to death in the municipality of Ahaus.