A second Ukrainian teen refugee has died after succumbing to injuries sustained in a frenzied knife attack in the German city of Oberhausen by a migrant gang earlier this month.
Artem Kozachenko, an 18-year-old Ukrainian national, was hospitalized with multiple stab wounds after he and his teammates from a local basketball team were set upon by foreign youths on the evening of Sunday, Feb. 11, as they returned home from practice.
His friend, 17-year-old Volodymyr Yermakov, died at the scene while Kozachenko was rushed for emergency treatment. Despite initially surviving the attack, he has now died.
“Artem has been in intensive care at the hospital since the brutal attack in Oberhausen,” wrote ART Giants, the local basketball team both teens played for, on Instagram. “Unfortunately, over the past few days, his condition deteriorated so significantly that doctors could do nothing more for him,” it added.
News of the stabbings was first reported by the Kyiv Basketball Federation in a social media post on the evening of the attack, in which they claimed the young basketball players “were attacked with knives on the street just because they were Ukrainians.”
The federation added that, according to preliminary information, “the criminals are eight young people of Arab appearance.”
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party released a statement following the death of the second victim, describing the incident as evidence of the “brutal everyday violence that the established parties and media like to shroud in silence.”
It referenced the migrant crime case tracker published by the party a year ago, which keeps tabs and pinpoints the location of all reported crimes across Germany involving a foreign suspect.
“Given the multitude of thousands of ‘individual cases,’ we can only give an incomplete but very frightening overview,” the party warned.
Referring to Kozachenko’s death, the statement referenced the perpetrators currently being charged, which include “a 15-year-old German-Turkish stabber and his accomplices — a 14-year-old German-Greek and two Syrians.”
Despite the racial profile of the victims and the suspects, German police said they were not treating the incident as a politically motivated attack, according to t-online.