An Afghan illegal migrant managed to escape Austria to Britain by posing as a refugee following gang rape and child murder accusations.
Raculi Zubaidullah, 23, has been accused — along with three other suspects — of gang-raping and killing 13-year-old Austrian girl Leonie Walner on the 26th of June 2021, a British extradition court heard on Thursday 6th of January 2022.
Zubaidullah faces extradition back to Austria — after fleeing to Britain posing as a refugee and hiding in a migrant hotel in London — for the charges of rape and severe sexual abuse of a person under the age of 14.
Jonathan Swain, prosecuting Zubaidullah at the extradition court, accused him of being the one who killed Leonie: “He [Zubaidullah] grabbed and choked her until she was no longer able to breathe and was suffocated and therefore ultimately died as a result”.
Judge Michael Snow will make a judgement on whether Zubaidullah will be deported back to Austria on the 12th of January 2022 at 12:30 p.m.
The fugitive migrant and his accomplices, all originally from Afghanistan, allegedly force-fed Leonie as many as eleven ecstasy pills then gang-raped and suffocated her, eventually attempting to dispose of Leonie’s body by rolling her up in a carpet and dumping her.
Two of the migrants allegedly started giving Leonie ecstasy pills after meeting her at Danube Canal before luring her back to their friends at an apartment in Donaustadt.
Austrian police managed to catch the three other suspects after they allegedly boasted to a friend about having “wild sex” with a young girl. The friend immediately reported them to the police on hearing their sickening crimes.
Following reports that Leonie’s body was found wrapped in the carpet under a tree in central Vienna in June 2021 — about 100 metres from Zubaidullah’s apartment — Zabidullah took advantage of the EU’s Schengen Area to escape to France, sparking a pan-European manhunt.
In Schengen Area countries, individuals are not required to show any identification when crossing the largely checkpoint-free borders of other Schengen members.
Zabidullah later managed to board a human trafficker’s boat to reach the British port city of Dover, and upon posing as a refugee and giving a fake name was placed by British authorities into a hotel in Whitechapel, east London, at taxpayers’ expense.
British police managed to arrest Zubaidullah while he was hiding in the hotel in July 2020, just over a month after Leonie’s body was found, following a tip-off from the Austrian police, The Telegraph reports.
The fugitive migrant Zubaidullah has also been on trial three times for crimes including bodily injury and drug trafficking, all of which occurred after Austria had already rejected an asylum application.
It also emerged that three of the four Afghans suspected in the Leonie case had been declined asylum in Austria, but due to appeal processes they were never deported back to Afghanistan. Some were at large at the time of the crime despite having been rejected as long ago as 2017.
Following the reporting of the heinous crimes by Austrian news website OE24, a far-left mob from the “Alerta Feminista” group stormed OE24’s office and allegedly attacked several staff members, accusing the outlet of “racist reporting” for revealing the ethnicity of the attackers.
Releasing a statement following the attack, Oe24 managing director Niki Fellner said: “We condemn this violent intrusion of masked extremists on media freedom in the strongest possible terms. We will not allow anyone, and certainly not such actions, to hinder our critical reporting.”
“OE24 has played a leading role in exposing the judicial failure of the recent femicide by four Afghans and will not allow itself to be silenced by any action. In particular, we condemn the attacks on our female sales staff, who were terrified by the activists, and demand the harshest consequences from the authorities”, Fellner stated.