A 13-year-old girl in Austria has been forced to flee her community with her family after she was repeatedly raped and sexually abused by a gang of 17 migrants over the course of several months. The family’s decision to leave Vienna was spurred by the fact that police have failed to detain the suspects.
The girl, who was 12 at the time of her ordeal, was allegedly repeatedly abused by the gang of migrants in Vienna. The perpetrators were of a diverse, non-Austrian background, with suspects hailing from Syria, Turkey, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia, and other nations. Out of the 17 suspects, 12 of them are minors between the ages of 14 and 18, one is 19, and two are 14, which in Austria is the age of criminal responsibility.
According to local news reports, the young girl, who has been referred to as “Mia” out of a concern for her privacy, was first assaulted at the parking garage in Vienna’s main train station last year. What had begun as a “consensual” kiss resulted in further sexual abuse being forced upon her by a 16-year-old boy. In a victim statement, Mia said she gave into verbal pressure to “satisfy” him after fearing she wouldn’t be allowed to leave if she did so. In the months that followed, she was repeatedly pressured into performing sex acts on other members of the migrant gang, with additional physical abuse being documented in at least one instance.
Mia further told police that she repeatedly told the suspects that she didn’t want to engage in sexual activity, but that they forced themselves upon her.
“They surrounded me, hugged me and touched me so much that I couldn’t just walk away,” she said.
The investigation only began in October of last year after Mia finally divulged her abuse to her mother. The outraged parent collected evidence from the rapists’ social media accounts, and then went to the police station with it. A number of the suspects were then arrested and questioned in February.
During the investigations, the suspects claimed that everything was consensual, and that Mia had said was 14, the age of consent in Austria. However, German newspaper Bild revealed that chat logs showed the opposite. The logs also demonstrated that the suspects knew the activity was non-consensual, with one of them directly acknowledging that Mia had begged them to stop.
One suspect, named in the press as Abdul, was 15 at the time of the assault. Abdul allegedly blackmailed Mia, stating he had videos and photos of what they did to her but would delete them if she submitted to his sexual demands. Videos of her assaults had been circulating on both Snapchat and Instagram.
Further investigation into the cell phone logs of the suspects revealed a trove of further potential crimes committed, with police finding pictures of the young men posing with knives, huge amounts of cannabis, and videos of gang fights.
The main suspect, Ahmad, currently 17, and the alleged perpetrator of the initial parking garage assault, is “a member of hacker groups in which credit card data is offered” according to police. While Jakub, 14 and from Syria, had saved “numerous” videos on his phone of assaults on Mia, and had “chat conversations about plans for large-scale drug trafficking and the theft of mopeds.” In November of 2023, he received three months probation for theft after allegedly stealing a car and a handbag.
A second investigation was opened into the gang after it came out that they had tried to fake Mia’s chat history to make it seem as though she were consenting, according to her lawyer Sascha Flatz.
“You know that I was raped… I reported it… But that thing is… I wanted it… and I told those boys I was 16,” chat history from a fake Instagram account set up in Mia’s name reads.
In September, some of the gang became concerned that Mia would go to the police. They began discussing the rape videos they had circulated, becoming anxious that their faces were visible in some of the footage.
“Brother, and besides, you are being seen very closely and your face in this f**k video and not just me, you are exposing yourself with it,” one of them wrote in a chat on September 8 of last year. “I’m at Friday prayer, behave yourself,” another replied, nonchalantly dismissing the worry while he was at mosque.
Despite the alleged gang rapists being charged with child sexual abuse and child pornography, only one has been remanded to police custody.
In March, Mia said that her family lives in fear, and that their lives have had to change as a result of their concerns that the perpetrators, who are still at large, would retaliate against them. Mia told press that she no longer even able to go outside.
“We don’t know what they’re thinking, or what their family members or friends are thinking. Nobody can know that. We have to be constantly on guard. You can’t live freely anymore,” adding that their lives had now become “hell.”
Since then, the family have fled Vienna.
“Why was I forced to move to protect my daughter, which cost me a lot of money and energy?” Mia’s mother said in June. “Why doesn’t the justice system ensure that nothing bad happens to my little one?”
