A pair of asylum seekers accused of luring, drugging and raping two teenage girls are standing trial in Vienna today in a case which has shaken Austria.
The girls, aged 14 and 15, had been celebrating the country’s national holiday in Keplerplatz, in the south of the capital, last October when the men encouraged them to get into a taxi.
The unnamed men, reported to be Algerian nationals aged 24 and 32, allegedly told the girls ‘come on, we’ll take you to a party’, before luring them to an illegally occupied ‘horror house’, Austrian media reports.
There the men allegedly forced them to take various drugs and subjected them to 15 hours of horrific abuse, threatening to kill them if they did not comply.
‘The younger man held a gun to my temple,’ the 14-year-old is reported to have said during her interrogation, with the pistol later being revealed to be a toy gun.
The men allegedly raped the teenagers and forced them to perform sexual acts on them, with the 15-year-old girl said to have been grabbed and strangled by the older of the two men.
The girls reportedly testified that they were treated like objects by the men, and were left with injuries including strangulation marks, bruises and scratches after the brutal assault.
‘He said, in essence, that no one could hear her and that he would kill her if she didn’t have sex with him,’ the court reportedly heard.
The girls had been celebrating the country’s national holiday in Keplerplatz (pictured), in the south of the capital, when the men encouraged them to get into a taxi
The older alleged attacker said he could not explain the cause of the 15-year-old girl’s severe injuries.
‘We just wanted to have a little fun,’ he reportedly said. Both men deny the charges, which could see them jailed for ten years.
The older man said in his defence: ‘I’m only guilty of taking drugs and not knowing the girls were underage. They said they were 24 and 21.’
The 14-year-old girl reportedly tried to get help as her friend was being attacked, the prosecution said, calling the police to tell them that her friend had been raped at a party.
But the girl was unable to tell officers where she was and attempts to locate her and her friend were unsuccessful.
The older man then attacked the younger girl, Kronen Zeitung reports, with the 24-year-old man also allegedly taking part in the vicious rape and assault.
The girls were not able to get away from the abandoned house until the men fell asleep the next afternoon, at which point they fled.
The sleeping men were arrested shortly after, local media reports.
The men face up to ten years in prison if they are found guilty at the trial in the Vienna Regional Court (pictured)
Andreas Reichenbach, the lawyer for the 24-year-old defendant, said that the group had been at a party where ‘the two girls were just chilling.’
Although his client was there on October 26, the day the alleged attack took place, he reportedly said that no rape occurred.
‘Furthermore, he doesn’t speak a word of German, and the girls were already under the influence of drugs when they arrived,’ the lawyer added.
The older defendant said that on the night in question the girls ‘made TikTok videos, we smoked a little, I took cocaine. Then [the 15-year-old girl] wanted sex.’
This was the first time he admitted to having sexual intercourse with the child, Heute reports, something which DNA traces are said to have already proven.
