A Somali asylum seeker has been sentenced to six years in prison for the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl at a train station in Langenzersdorf, Lower Austria.
The Korneuburg Regional Court delivered the verdict after hearing harrowing details of the attack and rejecting the defendant’s attempts to downplay the crime.
As reported by Kronen Zeitung, the assault took place on the night of Aug. 7 when the victim was on her way home, talking to her mother on the phone. The defendant, who was intoxicated, approached her at the station. After she ignored his advances, he later claimed he “felt like he had to rape her.” He dragged the girl between two vehicles in the station’s parking lot and attacked her. After the assault, he demanded her phone and money before fleeing the scene, leaving the girl lying on the ground.
During the trial, the defendant shocked the courtroom with his grin and statement, “I couldn’t hold back,” which he offered as a justification for his actions. When questioned, he described himself as having been drunk and wanting to “get to know her.”
He later attempted to express remorse, telling the court, “Everyone makes mistakes.” However, the judge firmly dismissed this, stating: “You’re talking about a mistake, but these are two capital crimes. Your confession is not genuine; it only comes because of overwhelming evidence.”
DNA traces found on the victim and at the crime scene, combined with surveillance footage, conclusively tied him to the crime.
Investigations uncovered that the defendant, who had been registered as a 17-year-old in Austria, had previously used seven different alias identities and birth years across various European countries. A forensic age analysis revealed he was at least 21 years old at the time of the attack, allowing him to be prosecuted as an adult under stricter laws.
The 14-year-old victim has been in therapy since the assault, working to process the emotional and psychological trauma. Her legal representatives stressed the severity of the attack, urging the court to impose the maximum sentence.
“This girl’s life has been permanently scarred by what happened that night,” her counsel said. “The court must ensure that the defendant faces the full consequences of his actions.”
The court sentenced the Somali national to six years in prison and ordered him to pay €2,500 in compensation to the victim.
“I have to react here with a severe punishment,” said the presiding judge, although some credit was given for his partial confession.
The judgment is final, as the defendant accepted his sentence without appeal.
Dictatorships never end well and no matter how resistant (like Soviet communism for 80 years) they always have an expiration date, let alone family dictatorships with 10 percent of Alawites tyrannizing over 80 percent of Sunnis.
It is incredible that Damascus fell in a week without a fight. Like Iraq under the advance of ISIS and “Western” Kabul before the Taliban.
The Syrian civil war had transformed Syria into a puppet regime controlled by Iran and Russia.
After the fall, Syria will follow demographic lines. Demography, in the Middle East but also in Europe, is always in favor of Islam. Perhaps the country will divide into ethnic-religious enclaves or perhaps it could turn into a real civil war or, most likely, into a terrible combination of the two. The only thing the Middle East is not known for is stability. And chaos is the only thing you can bet on in the Middle East. And only Westerners rotten to the core do not see that Israel is our only rock in that part of the world, so decisive for history, religion, energy and terrorism.
Who wins and who loses from this watershed moment? There are more losers and even those who win have a lot to lose.
The Iranians lose, they who used Syria as a base and passage. Whether the fall of Damascus will be the “Kabul moment” of the Islamic Revolution remains to be seen.
The Russians lose, not only their bases on the Mediterranean, but a historic ally after 1991.
The Kurds lose, they are the ones who have everything to fear from the advent of an Islamic regime and who were our only true allies in this war between barbarians. Erdogan and Islam cannot stand this small people who arm women, who have their hair in the wind, who leave religion in the private sphere and who helped us destroy ISIS.
An appeal in Le Figaro signed by French intellectuals Pascal Bruckner, Bernard Kouchner and Stephane Breton states: “The Kurds of Syria have defeated the Islamists who have caused the worst attacks in our history. When young Kurdish fighters with admirable courage are captured by jihadists, they are tortured, disemboweled and torn to pieces. This barbarity is unsustainable. The Kurds are our only allies in the region and have proven their effectiveness on the ground. If we abandon them, there will be no one to help us contain new terrorist explosions against us. Finally, the Kurds of Syria are building a democratic society that respects ethnic and religious pluralism and equality between men and women”.
Christians and all those who do not want to live under Sunni and Sharia rule also lose: women without veils, religious minorities, free and secular people. The motto of the winners of the revolution is “the Alawites in the grave, the Christians in Lebanon”.
Europe loses, a Europe which cannot say anything and which will welcome not only refugees, but terrorists who will then use Syria as a base for Jihad. It is shocking that Europe no longer has any foreign policy.
Erdogan wins, the figure who finances the Islamic insurrection and can add a piece to the puzzle of his “Erdoganistan”.
Qatar wins, as it has always armed the Syrian Islamic rebels.
ISIS wins, and is already exploiting the situation to reconstitute itself (at the height of its power it controlled a third of Syria).
America wins and loses. It is far away and not affected by any Middle Eastern geopolitical shocks, which wins in the short term due to the fall of a piece of the “axis of evil” but which could soon be forced to intervene again against a terrorist army.
Israel wins and loses: it wins because, after the blow dealt to Hezbollah, a historic ally of Khomeinism is no longer there. It loses, because for the Jewish enclave the best outcome would have been a weakened Assad. No one knows what can come out of an Islamic regime. In the short term, divide and conquer.
Above all, political Islam wins. We are witnessing the greatest Islamic flare-up since 2011, when the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power in Egypt. In the streets of Syria, a revolution is taking place to the cry of “Allahu Akbar” led by former lieutenants of Al Qaeda and ISIS, whose leader still has a $10 million bounty on his head from the United States. If they build a sort of Caliphate on the Mediterranean, they will go down in history.
“In the ruins of cities like Aleppo, Christians who refuse to convert to Islam were kidnapped, executed and beheaded by Islamist rebels.” This is what the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, wrote ten years ago.
In the Middle East, history always repeats itself. But worse than before.
“They want to restore the Caliphate,” explains Le Figaro. “They consider the Kurds and Christians as an extension of the West into Muslim lands.”
But who are these rebels? Who is their leader, Al Golani, so called because he claims the Israeli Golan?
Yesterday it was called Al Nusra, today it is called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an offshoot of Al Qaeda. Kurds and Christians have everything to fear from the advancing Islamists, whose online communications advocate the systematic looting and destruction of Christian villages and the enslavement of Kurdish women.
Mark Dubowitz writes: “America and Israel’s only true allies in the Syrian conflict are the Kurds. The others are adversaries: Erdogan, Assad, Putin, Khamenei, Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shia militias, and Golani. Our failure to support the Kurds over the years has been a grave mistake.”
But let’s look at who has taken power.
“Christians are pigs. They do not deserve to live.” These are the words of an Islamist rebel to a Christian, Elia Gargous, one of those kidnapped by the Al Nusra militia, outside of Rableh in western Syria. They were taken to the convent of St. Elias, two miles from Rableh. There, Christians watched helplessly as icons were smashed in front of them. Gargous said: “They told us to convert, but we refused. They killed people in front of us.”
In an interview with Al Jazeera, then-head of Al Nusra, Al Golani, explained what the future would be for Syria’s religious minorities. The Alawites would have to “correct their doctrinal errors and embrace Islam.” But it’s not just the Alawites, whom Golani referred to by using the Islamist term “Nusayris.” The Druze also need to be reformed from the “doctrinal pitfalls they fell into.”
Jihadists massacred entire families: “Al Nusra attacked Christian villages, killing only people who were in the army and Christians; one woman was massacred and a cross was put in her mouth.”
Today Golani declares that “diversity is our strength,” a phrase that sounds more like Western human resources departments than jihadist warlords. Like the “inclusive Taliban,” the jihadists know how to sell themselves to the West.
Wherever it governs, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham imposes sharia patrols, “Hisbah,” that beat and imprison women who violate Islamic dress or are caught traveling without a man. In Idlib, the Syrian city they governed for ten years, they stone women. Then there are the beheadings of children.
A new fatwa has just been launched by Islamic ideologists:
“The policy of Sharia and neutralizing enemies is in line with what Muhammad did when he neutralized the Jews”.
As soon as they took control of the Aleppo airport, the Islamists destroyed all the bottles of alcohol.
The village of Kanayé, on the Orontes River, in the governorate of Idlib, was invaded by Islamist militiamen who are now marching on Syria. What they did was revealed by Giuseppe Nazzaro, the vicar emeritus of Aleppo:
“In Kanayé, the Salafi militiamen and the jihadists of ‘Jabhat al-Nousra’ have ordered the parish priest to stop ringing the bells. Women must no longer go out into the streets with their heads uncovered, but must be veiled. And if they do not obey these orders, the threat is massacre. We are faced with what they have already done in the nearby village of Ghassanieh for over a year. In Ghassanieh they ordered the inhabitants to leave the village immediately, otherwise they would massacre them, and they obtained the desired result: to occupy the village with all the Christians dispossessed. In Kanayé, they did not force the population to leave but to live according to Islamic law”.
The Islamist program has a simple and effective slogan: “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people”.
Jews had lived in Arab countries for 2,500 years, starting with the “Babylonian Captivity.” In 1948, they represented 3.6 percent of the population in Libya, 2.8 percent in Morocco, and 2.6 percent in Iraq. Their social position varied in different countries.
In Iraq and Egypt, some Jews were successful in their occupations and professions and played a certain role in their societies; in Yemen and Morocco, they were generally poor. Pogroms occurred in Libya, Syria, Morocco, and especially Iraq, where in the space of two days in June 1941, a pogrom, known as “Farhud,” occurred in Baghdad: under the pro-Nazi regime of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, 179 Jews were murdered and 600 wounded. In Libya, in 1945, Islamists in Tripoli killed more than 140 Jews.
In several other Arab countries, Jews were murdered, kidnapped and persecuted. Arab League countries decided to strip their Jews of their citizenship. Iraq stripped its Jews of their citizenship in 1950 and their property in 1951. Egypt and Libya passed laws that “Zionists” were not citizens. They ignored the Jews who had lived in those countries for more than a thousand years and certainly before the birth of Muhammad.
With the creation of Israel in 1948, Jews in Arab and Islamic countries in the Middle East faced dispossession, organized discrimination, violence, attacks and pogroms. By the mid-1970s, nearly all Jews, more than 850,000, had left those countries. The largest numbers came from Morocco (265,000); Algeria (140,000), Iraq (135,000) and Tunisia (105,000). Nearly all 55,000 Jews living in Yemen were taken to Israel. 130,000 Jews were airlifted from Iraq to Israel. 600,000 of the more than 850,000 Jews of Islam went to Israel.
A story that no one teaches in schools or newspapers.
An Arab revolt in Aleppo in 1947 killed dozens of Jews and destroyed hundreds of homes, shops and synagogues. It was the beginning of the mass Jewish emigration from Syria to Israel. At the time of the war in 1967, 1,000 Jews remained.
Officially, Jews were considered “Syrian citizens,” but on their identity cards there was a red embossed mark: “Jew.” They could move freely only within a radius of five kilometers from their homes and were forbidden to sell real estate. If a Jew died, his property passed to the “government agency for Palestinian affairs.” Jews were frequently registered and subjected to checks: raids on their homes even at night, searches, torture.
Judy Feld Carr, a Toronto Jew born in 1939, a music teacher, is the woman who organized the escape of over 3,000 Jews from Damascus, Aleppo and Qamishli to Israel and America, in one of the most incredible rescue operations after the Holocaust, beginning in the mid-1970s. A Jewish woman originally from Aleppo who was living in Toronto decided to return to her homeland to visit her brother who was still there. She returned with a letter, which she gave to Feld Carr. “It was a letter that I would have expected at the time of the Holocaust,” recalls the professor. “It was written by three rabbis of the community: ‘Our children are your children. Get us out of here,’ I remember it saying.”
At the time, the Syrian regime did not allow Jews to emigrate and tortured those captured who tried to escape. It took two years to get the first person to escape, for a ransom. Canada did not have an embassy in Damascus, so it was difficult to find a way to bribe Syrian officials. That first Syrian rabbi to escape had already been imprisoned and tortured and was terminally ill with cancer. Thanks to Judy, he realized his dream of drinking coffee in Israel with his mother. Then she made a wish: “Take my daughter out of Syria.”
And so the Canadian took action for the girl, who was 19 at the time (she now lives in Bat Yam and is a grandmother). One by one, with the financial support of the Canadian community, without ever setting foot in Syria, Judy helped 3,328 Jews out of the 4,600 who lived there escape (almost all of the rest managed to escape by their own means or with the help of Israel). Observing the news that came from Syria after the outbreak of the civil war, the massacres, the disappearance of minorities, Carr said: “I don’t think the Jews would be alive today if that community of over 3,000 were still there. I can tell you that.”
If the Jews had remained in Syria, they would have met the same fate as the Christian Ninar Odisho, who was in the city of al-Tabqah, which had been in the hands of Islamic rebels for over a year, when he was approached by some jihadists. After pointing guns at him, they let his two friends go because they were Muslims, while they beat Ninar to death, after learning that he was a Christian.
They can blame Israel all they want: Christians will not be spared. “In February 2014, I met with the head of the Jewish community in Egypt, Magda Haroun,” wrote Coptic Samuel Tadros in the New York Times. “Today, she told me, there are 15 Jews left in the country, out of a population that once numbered 100,000. Ms. Haroun said she feared the Copts would soon follow. At the time, I thought the prospect was exaggerated. But I myself had left the country, and so had hundreds of thousands of Copts. Ms. Haroun was right.”
Yes, she was right.
Like Mosab Hassan Yousef, at this point I only hope that those in charge have destroyed in time the chemical and biological weapons that Assad has in his arsenals. Because the idea of a bearded Islamist who believes in the invincibility of Allah and in the conquest of Rome with his fingers on a barrel of gas does not leave me at all calm. I would not like to witness live the scene from the TV series Jack Ryan in which a Syrian Islamist spreads sarin in a church in Paris.
Notre Dame is well worth an attack. Stand guard, Europe.
Police forces from the states of Baden-Württemberg and Hesse have arrested two Lebanese brothers aged 15 and 20 and a 20-year-old Turkish man. The public prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe has accused them of ‘preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state’. This was announced by the prosecution on Tuesday. The arrest took place on Sunday.
According to the statement, the three suspected terrorists had already procured ‘an assault rifle with the corresponding ammunition’. The investigators have a well-founded suspicion ‘that the two brothers have made concrete preparations for an attack due to their strong religious ideology and profound sympathy for the Islamist terrorist organisation “Islamic State (IS)”’. In addition to the assault rifle, the police found ‘a balaclava, a tactical waistcoat, several knives and various mobile phones and data carriers’. The latter are currently still being analysed.
The two Lebanese men from Mannheim and the Turkish man from the Hochtaunus district have already been brought before a magistrate and are in custody. The public prosecutor’s office assured: ‘There was no concrete danger to the public at any time.’
The leftist government in Britain has come under fire from former military top brass over plans to use electric vehicles on the battlefield as a part of its green energy agenda push.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is reportedly set to accelerate tests of battlefield electric vehicles in the coming year. Although initially thought up under the so-called Conservative government in 2019, the experimental testing is an expansion by the recently-elected left-wing Labour Party government, The Telegraphreports.
A government source told the broadsheet: “New and emerging technologies can support decarbonisation efforts and improve battlefield capability, reducing the supply chain vulnerability of liquid fuel and also reducing the heat signature and noise of vehicles on the battlefield.”
According to the paper, the Labour government has ploughed over £400,000 in contracts to defence firm Magtec, which specialises in installing electric drive systems in vehicles.
Last week, Prime Minister Starmer said that the green agenda will be a key focus of his government’s defence strategy, which would seek to “support net zero, regional growth, and economic security and resilience”.
The plans have come under heavy criticism from prominent retired military officials over concerns that the government may be prioritising its ideological vision over the safety of British troops on the battlefield.
The former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Kemp, said: “What this amounts to is virtue signalling by MoD, trying to get into the climate change agenda. I suspect it will be wasting quite a lot of people’s time and resources in trying to show they are playing their part. At the moment, the technology is just not there.”
Colonel Kemp explained that keeping traditionally powered vehicles supplied with fuel is already a difficult task and said that he “can’t see how it would possibly work with EVs.”
“Fighting battles is an extremely difficult activity – to make it unnecessarily even more difficult seems to be a crazy endeavour. I would be pretty confident that it is just not at all a starter in terms of maintaining the level of battleground capability that we have now.”
The former leader of the Royal Irish Regiment in Iraq, Colonel Tim Collings added that he “doubts” that enemy forces will be considering converting their vehicle fleets to electric anytime soon, as they will “be looking for immediate effect, not approval ratings or whatever.”
“I doubt a battery can currently provide the horsepower necessary for warfare. What’s driving this? Is it battlefield necessity or fashion? If it’s fashion then it’s a bad idea. Renewables alone aren’t sufficient to deliver the power we need for potential conflicts,” he said.
An MoD spokesman said that the “rapid advancement of electric vehicle technology has opened up new possibilities for military applications” and the planned tests will be to determine if the EVs can “match or exceed” the performance of traditional vehicles.
“The Ministry of Defence remains committed to pursuing innovations that could enhance the operational effectiveness of our Armed Forces, while also supporting sustainability where possible.”
The panel began the episode by looking at a clip of an interview with former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in which he finally admitted that the Russia-Ukraine war is a “proxy war” between the West and Russia.
“Let’s face it, we’re waging a proxy war. We’re waging a proxy war. But we’re not giving our proxies the ability to do the job. And we’re in for years and years now, we’ve been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. And it has been cruel; it has been cruel. And we need now to give them what they need,” Johnson said in the interview.
Wright emphasized that Johnson’s admission is fitting because he played a major role in NATO’s efforts to destabilize Russia and absorb it into the West.
“Despite the fact that the Rand Corporation published the strategy in 2019, which was to overextend and destabilize Russia by bleeding it on the battlefield and, therefore, plunder Russia afterwards, absorbing it into the [Western] sphere. The idea that it was a proxy war was dismissed as a conspiracy theory and the idea that Boris Johnson might have had a hand in starting that proxy war was also a conspiracy theory – which, of course, he did many weeks after the war actually began, when he went to Kiev in a surprise visit to sabotage the peace deal,” Wright said.
“This is Boris Johnson’s war from start to finish, and it’s fitting that it should be he who comes on to the mainstream media and finally names it appropriately,” he added.
A bit later in the episode, the panel turned to news from the Vatican, where Pope Francis recently wrote to an Italian grandmother who was distressed about her children’s lack of affection for raising her grandchildren in the faith. The Pontiff told her to “accompany” them but notably not to “insist” on her grandchildren’s baptism.
Fr. Murr underscored that grandparents can play a pivotal role in the catechesis of their grandchildren and have every right to insist on their grandchildren being baptized.
“If the Holy Father would have said, ‘Don’t nag, don’t nag your sons or daughters to death,’ I understand that. But to push and to insist, and to show how important it is to me as your grandfather, your grandmother, they have every right to do that, every right to do that,” Murr said.
“And they should continue; they should also [do] as much as they can – it’s hard today because the distractions are incredible to young people – but as much as they can to catechize those grandchildren when they have them there. Just take one question from the Catechism and sit down and explain it for five minutes, and then [have] 10 minutes of chocolate or something. The grandparents certainly have a role. We’re not disconnecting family. And I think His Holiness is off base again,” the priest added.
For more discussion on Boris Johnson’s admission that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war, the Pope’s stunning response to a distressed grandmother, and much more, tune in to this week’s episode of Faith and Reason.
Salafists are trying to convert young women to radical Islam online. With increasing success. The ultra-conservative ideas are being spread in a very modern way by influencers on social networks. The aim is for the victims to cover themselves up, obey men and bear children.
Investigators cannot say how often it happens. However, it is certain that there has been a sharp increase in cases recently. And the victims of radicalisation are getting younger and younger. According to a report by public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk, the age of initiation is now 14 to 15. The State Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism in Upper Austria has also made this observation.
In November, the newspaper JF reported exclusively on a secret report by the authority. It speaks of Catholic girls who are persuaded to convert to radical Islam. They are then quickly married off to Muslims with the aim of ‘giving birth to fighters’. The radicalisation is said to take place on the internet.
A woman who has left the scene now tells German broadcaster BR how these radicalisations take place. Male and female influencers with tens of thousands of followers spread propaganda and present themselves as religious authorities on social networks. ‘If you talk a lot about Islam, young girls think you are a scholar,’ the report quotes the anonymous insider. The messages conveyed are explosive. ‘Women can do jobs, but with controls’, preaches a Salafist on TikTok, for example. But the influencers have no real interest in the girls. ‘The moment you convert to Islam, you are marginalised,’ the dropout is quoted as saying.
A spokesperson for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Bavaria adds: ‘At the beginning, simple questions from everyday life are used – for example, finding a partner, raising children or clothing. Women are attracted by such topics, and only later does the ideologisation follow.’ Just how serious the problem is is made particularly clear by one figure: in Germany alone, authorities speak of 11,500 known Salafists living here.
A group of five Arab-looking men brutally beat up a 26-year-old man in the Treptow district of Berlin. The victim was draped with a Syrian flag over his shoulders to celebrate the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad.
According to the police, the Syrian lost consciousness during the attack. A passer-by who witnessed the attack alerted the officers. Apparently, the perpetrators had literally hunted down people who were celebrating the downfall of the regime in their home country with flags. According to the police report, five Arabs jumped out of a car while the man was waiting at a bus stop on Köpenicker Landstraße shortly before midnight. According to the victim, the perpetrators spoke Lebanese Arabic. The man was taken to hospital with lacerations to his face and bruises.
In Berlin, thousands of mainly male Syrians celebrated the victory of the rebels under Islamist leadership in their home country. Large crowds gathered everywhere in the capital to take to the streets with Syrian flags. A total of one million Syrians live in Germany – five per cent of the citizens of the Arab state.
History is interesting because it isn’t over yet. At the Battle of Tours, a.k.a. the Battle of Poitiers, Charles Martel prevented Islam from doing to Europe what it did to Syria. This took place 1,292 years ago. Yet the outcome of the battle is still contested:
Three young adults suspected of plotting a jihadist attack on various targets, in particular the town hall of Poitiers, were arrested on Wednesday by police officers from the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) in several departments, including Loire-Atlantique and Gard.
Explosives were involved.
According to their texts, this target was envisaged because of the symbolism of the Battle of Poitiers, in which Charles Martel’s troops were victorious against the Arab-Berber forces in 732. The three young men had also spoken of attacking the [General Directorate of Internal Security] headquarters or going to Syria.
Syria would be a great place for them, now that the Biden Regime has boastfully helped HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, formerly of ISIS, to power.
Their affiliation to a jihadist group is unclear, as the suspects mention both the Islamic State and HTS, the extremist Syrian rebel group once allied with Al-Qaeda.
It seemed al Qaeda and ISIS were behind us. But when it comes to history, objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear.
NCF Senior Fellow Rafe Heydel-Mankoo joined Mike Graham on TalkTV to review the morning papers. They discussed the fall of the Syrian dictator, who has fled to Russia, and the repercussions this will have.
Photo: Romanian Police on Facebook, 1 December 2023
Romania’s unprecedented political turmoil around the canceled presidential election seems unlikely to subside anytime soon, as authorities continue to uncover further details about the campaign of a little-known independent candidate, Călin Georgescu, and his shocking victory in the first round of the now-annulled race.
As we also reported, the country’s Constitutional Court ordered the entire election to be redone from scratch after declassified intelligence reports claimed a foreign actor (i.e. Russia) interfered in the election campaign by promoting Georgescu on social media with 25,000 fake accounts while real influencers were paid from separate but undisclosed domestic sources to do the same.
Despite these allegations, the Romanian Left and Right seem to be united in their outrage over the last-minute cancellation of the elections. The court’s decision was strongly criticized by politicians and parties across political lines, including by Georgescu’s pro-EU, liberal second-round contender Elena Lasconi, who accused the socialist-aligned judges of “destroying democracy” just to give the ruling socialist party (PSD) another chance at the presidency.The move might also serve as a dangerous precedent for the future of democracy across Europe. You don’t like the outcome? Just blame Russia and annul the vote, easy.
Nonetheless, the police conducted several raids linked to Georgescu over the weekend, no doubt seen by many as the establishment’s newest attempt to discredit him and retroactively justify the election annulment.
One of the raids involved searching the homes of a businessman suspected of having illegally assisted Georgescu’s campaign by financing undisclosed pro-Georgescu content on TikTok with nearly €1 million. In a separate operation, the police detained 20 people reportedly belonging to Georgescu’s private security team on their way to a polling station after finding an “arsenal” of illegal weapons and large sums of money in their cars, including their leader who runs a mercenary group in the Congo.
The financier behind Georgescu’s ‘0 lei’ campaign
The three properties raided in the city of Brașov belong to programmer-turned-business owner Bogdan Peșchir, who allegedly financed Georgescu’s campaign with €1 million, mostly through a South African firm, including at least €360,000 paid directly from his TikTok account “bogpr” to other influencers on the site at a rate of up to €950 per post.
Undisclosed political promotion is not only against TikTok’s terms of service but is also against the law, especially given that Georgescu’s officially declared campaign budget was €0 and he proudly flaunted his ‘grassroots’ support in every interview leading up to the election.
“The searches concern the possible involvement of a natural person in the illegal financing of the electoral campaign of a candidate for the presidency of Romania, through the use of sums of money that there are indications that they might be derived from the commission of crimes, being subsequently introduced in a money laundering process,” the authorities said on Saturday.
In a subsequent statement on Sunday, December 8th, the prosecutor’s office said it had seized crypto wallets worth over $7 million from Peșchir’s computers and transferred them to the accounts of the National Agency for the Administration of Unavailable Goods (ANABI) until the investigation determines the money’s origin.
There is a strong suspicion that the businessman came to his fortune illegally, as last week’s unclassified intelligence report mentions that “Bogdan Peșchir displays a standard of living that does not correspond to the activities carried out through the owned company.”
Bodyguard mercenary on a late-night stroll
On Saturday night, Romanian police detained 20 professional mercenaries who reportedly belong to Georgescu’s private security team after finding an “arsenal” of illegal firearms and bladed weapons, as well as large sums of cash in their cars. Their leader, Horațiu Potra—a local councilor in the city of Mediaş who runs a mercenary group in the Congo—was picked up from his luxury car, which also contained weapons and cash, heading the convoy towards the capital.
When asked where Potra and his entourage were headed with pistols and machetes, he said he was on his way to vote at a polling station in Bucharest, despite the elections being canceled and the fact that he lives in a different city.
Authorities suspect he was trying to orchestrate an intimidation campaign or instigate public unrest in and around the capital. Potra may have been heading to the same polling station near the capital where Georgescu organized his protest against the annulment on early Sunday, demanding the right to vote with around a hundred of his supporters.
The mercenary leader was seen being escorted out of the Prahova police station in handcuffs on Sunday night and prosecutors said he was charged with non-compliance with weapons and ammunition regulations as well as public instigation for violence against politicians on social media. His lawyers, however, say the charges are not linked to his connections to Georgescu or the fact that he is reportedly in charge of the independent candidate’s security.
Whatever may be the truth in these allegations, it’s clear that the court’s reckless decision to overturn the democratic will of the people has transformed Romania into a powder keg with no apparent way out of the chaos.
