Pool child rapist gets his sentence overturned by Austrian court

The judge concluded that the 20-year-old attacker, an Iraqi refugee, may have been “unaware” the boy did not want to be abused. At the pool the assailant, one Amir A., dragged a 10-year-old schoolboy into a locker room, bolted the door and violently sexually assaulted him.

The boy, known only by his first name, Goran, alerted a lifeguard to his ordeal. The boy suffered severe internal injuries due to assault and was rushed to a children’s hospital. He is still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. After the incident, Amir A. who had worked as a taxi driver in Iraq, reportedly returned to the swimming pool as if nothing had happened, enjoying the pool’s the diving board.

The assailant, who came to Austria via the Balkans in September 2015, confessed to the rape, saying he had experienced “sexual emergency” as he had not had sex for four months. When asked if such actions were legal in his home country, he admitted he knew that “such acts were forbidden in any country of the world,” Kronen Zeitung daily reported.

Amir A. has had considerable amounts of taxpayers money allocated to his integration process into Austrian society. He was also provided with a 15-year-old translator, but somehow had not inquired about the implications of what he had described as his “sexual emergency”.

In June, a court found Amir guilty of grave sexual assault and rape of a minor, and sentenced him to six years in prison. A court awarded the boy’s family €4,730 in compensation after prosecutors described him, according to the Kronen Zeitung, as suffering “profound despair”.

But on Thursday, the Supreme Court overturned the verdict and ordered a retrial, another Austrian daily Heute reported, as the conviction of rape could not be sufficiently proved.

The mother of the victim, who herself moved to Austria as a Serbian refugee, said her son suffers from severe panic attacks and needed constant medication in order to sleep. He “screams and cries” and is “often terrified,” she told Heute.

There have a growing number of sexual attacks by asylum seekers at swimming pools across Europe. A 37-year-old mother and her four-year-old son were subjected to a sexual assault in the quiet southern Austrian town of Klagenfurt in March, Kurier daily reported.

In Mistelbach, another Austrian town, a temporary pool ban on refugees was issued following a sexual assault by a “dark-skinned” man on a 13-year-old girl in June. According to Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung, the girl was first followed by her rapist into the women’s changing room. Once there, he forced her to perform oral sex. The girl, however, fiercely resisted and started shouting, forcing the attacker to flee.

A curfew was imposed in the northern Austrian city of Wels after a series of sexual assaults at a local wine and beer festival in early September, which were committed by Afghan minors. Some 17 sexual assaults were noted by the police.

“We had the problem that the female visitors of the festival being the victims of sexual assaults. 17 women in the age between 18 and 50 years were abused during the festival in Wels. Their abusers were refugees from Afghanistan and these refugees were between the ages of 15 and 16,” the mayor told RT, adding that one of the rapists was 23 years old.

At the biggest Swedish youth festival ‘We are Sthlm’ sexual assaults have doubled this year, despite extra security measures. The attackers were mostly migrants from Afghanistan and Morocco. Police said that there were 50 reports of sexual assaults at the festival.

Swedish festivals Karlstad and Norrloping too were marred by waves of sexual assaults allegedly committed by migrants. Dozens of Swedish woman were molested during both events. Bravalla Festival in Norrkoping witnessed almost 30 assaults, including five rapes, and Karlstad saw 32 similar attacks a week earlier.

A 40-year-old migrant from Eritrea with official refugee status was arrested as he was sexually assaulting an elderly woman at a cemetery in North Rhine-Westphalia, in the western German town of Iddenbueren in July.

A local resident alerted the police after he heard screams for help coming from the cemetery. The pensioner is known to visit the cemetery fairly regularly to mourn her long-dead sister, Bild reported.

The most striking case of sexual harassment by refugees occurred in Germany on New Year’s Eve last year. At that time, hundreds of women said they were harassed by attackers of “North African or Middle Eastern appearances” on 2016 New Year’s Eve near the central railway station in Cologne. Similar cases were also reported in other German cities. German authorities then tried to cover up the attacks.

A Cologne police Twitter post even described the atmosphere as “playful” on New Year’s morning.

Some 1 200 legal complaints were received, Die Welt, reported. Law enforcers identified 281 suspects, mostly coming from Tunisia, Morocco, Syria and other Arab countries.

Open border enthusiasts lambasted far right groups, particularly in Austria, for “using [the rapes and sexual assaults] to increase the marginalization of foreign nationals”.

But the numbers of those who welcome migrants are shrinking. A survey conducted by pollster GfK, shows 83 percent of Germans now consider immigration to be country’s biggest challenge – a staggering increase from last year’s figure of 35 percent.