A 14-year-old girl was found dead in an Afghan migrant’s apartment in Vienna this week after she was allegedly plied with narcotics and sexually abused. It comes in the wake of the nation being shocked by the gang rape of a 12-year-old girl by a “multicultural” gang of mostly foreign men.
On Tuesday, police discovered the lifeless body of a 14-year-old girl in the apartment of an Afghan migrant in the Simmering district of Vienna. According to investigators, the young girl died of a drug overdose, believed to have been supplied by the migrant man, who is suspected of sexually abusing the girl.
The suspect, a 26-year-old Afghan national, told police that he had “consensual sex” with the teenage girl, the Kronen Zeitung newspaper reports.
The migrant reportedly arrived in Austria in 2015 during the height of the European Migrant Crisis. Although his initial asylum application was rejected, upon appeal, he was granted “subsidiary protection”, a status allowing migrants who do not qualify as refugees to remain in the country.
The judicial order was extended twice, preventing him from being deported from the country before the death of the girl.
The incident comes just days after a 17-strong “multicultural” gang were accused of drugging and raping a 12-year-old girl in Vienna over a period of about five months last year, between February and June.
The alleged victim came forward last October with her mother to police, claiming that she was coerced by her abusers into performing sexual acts under threat of having indecent pictures and videos published online by her alleged rapists.
According to the German Welt newspaper, 13 teens were questioned and released by police last Thursday, and are said to have been from Austria, Bulgaria, Italy, Serbia, Syria, and Turkey. All of the 17 suspects in the case were already known to police for either violent or property crimes in Austria.
The scandal has prompted politicians to hold a summit to discuss lowering the age of criminal culpability, with current law only allowing for minors under the age of 14 to undergo therapy and social care rather than being held responsible for violent crimes.
Centre-right Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer has criticised the “defenselessness of the constitutional state” and said that the public must “talk about punishments” for young offenders, with teenage crime rising in the country.
However, the left-wing Green party, which serves in Nehammer’s government, has signalled opposition to the move, saying that it is opposed to “event-based legislation”.