Story By: Georgina Jadikovska, Sub-Editor: Marija Stojkoska, Agency: Newsflash
A suspected who boasted together with pals about gang-raping a 13-year-old Austrian schoolgirl who died in the attack has been arrested in London.
The teenager’s lifeless body was dumped beside a road next to a tree after being raped by the four men. Austin police say all four were immigrants from Afghanistan and arrested three, with an international manhunt carried out searching for the fourth.
That suspect has now been arrested in London.
Schoolgirl Leonie, 13, from the city of Wiener Neustadt near Austria’s capital Vienna, was reported missing by her parents Melanie P., 40, and Hannes W., 39, three days before she was found dead on a road verge with her body leaned up against a tree on Saturday morning on 26th June 2021.
The Austrian police arrested two Afghan immigrants in June and a third one at the beginning of July, after they allegedly boasted about having wild sex with the child, and have now captured a fourth one in the city of London on Thursday (29th July).
An 18-year-old Afghan immigrant was the first one to be caught by the police and was arrested while he was eating pizza in a local Italian restaurant on Monday, 28th June 2021.
Another 16-year-old Afghan native was arrested on the same day at a skating site on the Danube Island, while a third alleged offender who was reportedly aged 23, was caught several days later.
According to a spokesperson from the public prosecutor’s office, the fourth suspect who was reportedly aged 22, ran away and was searched for with an international arrest warrant issued by the Criminal Police Office of Austria (BK).
Despite the investigators’ suspicions that he fled to Italy, the man was recently found in an Afghan neighborhood in the English capital.
Initial findings revealed that the schoolgirl from the Lower Austrian district of Tulln met the 22-year-old man and his 16-year-old friend at the Danube Canal in the city of Vienna where they all took ecstasy on June 25.
The two Afghans then took the girl to the 22-year-old immigrant’s apartment located in Vienna’s 22nd district named Donaustadt, where they were joined by the 18-year-old and the 23-year-old suspects.
The men then gave Leonie more drugs to “make her compliant” and then savagely raped her before rolling her body in a carpet and disposing it on the street about 100-metres from the apartment.
Reportedly, the men were busted after an acquaintance of theirs went to the police and revealed that one of them who was his friend told him what had happened in the apartment.
The spokesperson did not reveal further details regarding the 22-year-old man’s arrest but Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer told local media (ORF) that it was a tribute to the hard work of the detectives involved.
Nehammer added: “The interrogations will now show the escape route.”
The investigation continues.
