Three Afghan migrants have been convicted by an Austrian court for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl in Vienna who was found dead, wrapped in a carpet next to a tree in 2021.
The three Afghans were found guilty of raping and leaving the 13-year-old to die — ‘murder by omission’ — after she had been given the drug ecstasy and overdosed, with all three migrants failing to help her. Instead, the three found her, wrapped her in a carpet, and left her body by a tree near the Vienna apartment where she died.
The court found the main defendant in the case guilty of murder, Kronen Zeitung reports, and sentenced him to life in prison for his role in the young teen’s death. The two migrant males, aged 20 and 19, were found guilty of murder by omission and given sentences of 19 and 20 years respectively, the European Union-funded website InfoMigrants reports. All three were found guilty of raping a child.
The judge presiding over the case said: “They used the girl like an object and showed indifference to Leonie’s life.”
The court found that the migrants had mixed seven ecstasy tablets into a drink and given it to Leonie to drink, so they could rape her. The autopsy revealed that she had died of both overdose and suffocation. The men all admitted to sexual activity with Leonie but insisted it was consensual during the trial.
Following the discovery of the 13-year-old’s body last year in July, it was revealed that several of the suspects involved in her death had existing deportation orders but were not deported from Austria due to appeal proceedings, despite some of them being convicted for crimes including drug trafficking and theft. The fact the men had criminal convictions before going on to rape and kill a child meant that the court could impose maximum sentences on the repeat offenders.
One of the suspects even fled the country following the killing of Leonie and was not arrested until weeks later when he was discovered in London in the UK after an international manhunt.
The 22-year-old was one of the two migrants who initially met Leonie the day she died at the Danube Canal and gave her drugs before she accompanied the two back to an apartment in Vienna’s Donaustadt.
Earlier this year in France, a case similar to the killing of Leonie emerged in Paris when a 12-year-old named Lola was also raped and killed. The main suspect in the case, a woman from Algeria, was also revealed to have had a deportation order, sparking a national discussion on the government’s failures to deport illegals from France.