A GANG of Iraqi migrants from the same family have been jailed for raping a German tourist.
An Austrian court found eight Iraqi nationals guilty of gang-raping the German tourist in a flat on New Year’s Eve.
Prosecutors charged the Iraqi men with “abuse of a defenceless person and rape in a very humiliating and agonising way for the victim.”
The Vienna Criminal Court sentenced the men to jail terms between nine and 13 years. A ninth man was acquitted.
All eight convicted men – who cannot be deported because Iraq is deemed to unsafe for them to return to – launched immediate appeals against their sentences.
The victim, a 28-year-old teacher, has been awarded more than £21,000 in damages.
Most of the men denied the charges but DNA proved that sperm from six of them was found in or on her body.
The court heard how the victim identified as Sabine K. arrived in Vienna on December 28 2015 to spend the New Year with a female friend in the city.
Shortly before midnight on December 31 they wandered into the city centre and at 2am were seen drinking in a bar-restaurant called Cactus.
Just before 3am the friend of Sabine noticed she was no longer there and was told by another patron that the men she had been talking with had “taken her away.”
Judge Petra Poschalko heard how the woman was taken by four of them to an apartment in Vienna’s Rustenschacher Allee where five other men were waiting. Sabine later said she found herself naked on a double bed being assaulted by the men one after the other.
Evidence as heard that said she was assaulted in the dark so she could not identify the men, according to her lawyer Karina Fehringer.
After the attacks, which went on for several hours, the victim needed in-patient treatment at a trauma clinic and now is under psychiatric care for post traumatic stress disorder.
The victim went to police where a tracking app on her mobile phone led officers to the rape scene.
The app showed that her ordeal lasted from 4.20am to 6.20am on January 1 2016.
The defendants, aged between 22 and 45, all arrived in Austria between May and December 2015 via the Balkan route.
Five of them were awarded refugee status. The applications of the other four were still pending at the time of the attack.
source: http://www.express.co.uk
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