Two African males have appeared in court in Germany charged with two separate counts of rape against a Ukrainian teenage refugee who had arrived in the country just days prior following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Rachid B., 38, from Tunisia, and Nigerian Abdullahi A., 26, stood trial on Wednesday in Düsseldorf after allegedly raping the 18-year-old Ukrainian refugee in two separate incidents on the Oscar Wilde Hotel ship back on March 6.
It is understood that the suspects, who both hold Ukrainian citizenship, had also claimed asylum in Germany in the days prior to the attack after fleeing Ukraine to Germany via Poland, and were accommodated on the hotel ship alongside their victim.
Prosecutors told the court that the young woman had met the accused Rachid B. at dinner on the ship and had followed her back to her cabin when he is said to have “attacked her immediately and brutally raped her,” according to the Bild newspaper.
She kept trying to defend herself, and shouted: “Stop! I don’t want that!”
Just minutes after Rachid B. had reportedly fled the scene, the second attacker, Nigerian Abdullahi A., entered the woman’s room and committed his own act of rape.
Neither of the accused spoke in court on Wednesday, and the victim was not present due to a positive coronavirus test.
A German police spokesperson said: “Politicians should now do everything to ensure that such terrible cases of rape as on the hotel boat in Düsseldorf do not accumulate.
“Harsh and swift punishment followed by deportation is the only language such perpetrators understand.”
Meanwhile, CSU MP Andrea Lindholz insisted that it was down to the police to do more to “specifically ensure the protection of Ukrainian women.”
The two suspects are a typical example of the concerns held by an insider German police chief in March, who revealed to German tabloids that many refugees arriving from Ukraine were not actually Ukrainian.
Similarly, an investigation from French newspaper Figaro, one of the top-selling newspapers in the country, found that approximately one in three people claiming they were Ukrainian refugees were not actually Ukrainians.
Those who are Ukrainians are generally vulnerable women and children, many of whom have already feared for their safety since arriving in Europe and being placed in close proximity to economic migrants from Africa claiming asylum, who are statistically majority adult males.
In two separate cases in Sweden, two Ukrainian boys were beaten with belts, pushed over, and threatened with a knife by a gang of Arab males, while Swedish news outlet Samnytt reported in March an incident where foreign national males entered a women’s refugee center for Ukrainian refugees in the town of Örebro and tried to attack them.
“They said that Sweden was a safe country, but I have not seen that,” one of the women told Swedish public radio at the time.