A 52-year-old Syrian man was sentenced to four and a half years in prison on Tuesday at the Vienna Regional Court after allegedly luring his six-year-old neighbour’s daughter into his flat and raping her. The verdict on charges of rape, serious sexual abuse of a minor and possession of child abuse material is now final.
The defendant initially denied the offence but confessed during the trial. In court, he finally said: “I admit to everything”, but added that it had “only happened once”. Both he and the prosecutor accepted the sentence. According to the prosecution, the incident took place on July 3, 2025, in a residential complex in Vienna. The man is alleged to have watched the girl playing in the courtyard and lured her into his flat with a lollipop. There, he is said to have partially undressed the child and performed sexual acts on her.
The prosecution stated that the defendant had pushed the child into the flat. The defence presented a different account of events, claiming that the girl had gone with him of her own free will because the man allegedly wanted to bring extra seating into the courtyard. The defendant himself claimed that he had merely touched the child.
Following his arrest, the man’s flat was searched. During the search, investigators seized around 5,500 to 6,000 files containing child abuse material from various storage devices, including images and videos. The man is also alleged to have shared two videos via WhatsApp. In addition, he took more than 160 screenshots of the material.
The proceedings also included a further allegation: the man is alleged to have shown a pornographic film on his mobile phone to another girl in a park and to have urged her to perform sexual acts. He eventually admitted to this as well, or rather no longer contested the allegation in the same way as he had at the outset.
At the start of the trial, the defendant had not yet confessed. It was only after the child had been questioned, in a hearing held in camera, that he admitted his guilt. The defence lawyer referred to a paedophilic disorder and described the offence as “horrific and shocking”.
The court ultimately imposed a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence. As the verdict is final, there will be no further appeal proceedings.
FPÖ Secretary-General and spokesperson on homeland security Michael Schnedlitz described the case as the “horrific result of a completely irresponsible immigration policy”. “This abhorrent case is yet another bloody example of what the ‘welcome culture’ of the establishment parties has brought upon our homeland: imported crime that stops at nothing and no one, and whose victims are our own children,” he stated in a press release.
For him, it is an intolerable situation that a Syrian man living off Austrian social benefits could commit such a brutal act against a child. The Syrian man has forfeited his right to hospitality in the most brutal way imaginable. Instead of discussing whether he should receive therapy here, the only logical consequence must be immediate deportation to his home country of Syria, Schnedlitz demanded. It is unreasonable to expect the Austrian public to foot the bill for the upkeep and, on top of that, the therapy of such criminals. He complained:
Every euro spent on detention, the justice system and therapy for such offenders is a euro wasted. It is a perversion of the system that we use our hard-earned tax money to finance ‘full care’ for criminal foreigners who deeply despise our society and attack our children.
Schnedlitz pointed out that, as soon as this offender begins his prison sentence, he will be treated like a private patient and receive the best medical care, whilst his victim languishes in the system of waiting lists. The fact that thousands of files containing child abuse material were also found in the offender’s possession shows “that we are dealing here with a ticking time bomb, which was only able to arrive in Austria because of the open-borders policy.”