An Iraqi migrant has confessed to raping a 10-year-old boy at a swimming pool cubicle in Vienna, Austria. He told police interrogators that he raped the boy due to “sexual emergency” caused by accumulation of “too much sexual energy” after going without sex for months.
Austrian police said the 20-year-old migrant dragged the 10-year-old boy into a cubicle at Theresienbad swimming pool in Vienna and assaulted him so brutally that he had to be hospitalized and treated for severe injuries.
According to the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung , police said that after the attack, the migrant abandoned his victim inside the cubicle and returned casually to enjoy himself at the pool. He climbed up a three-meter board and practiced diving into the pool repeatedly.
Meanwhile, the injured victim left the cubicle in pain and alerted lifeguards tearfully, according to the Kronen Zeitung .
Shocked lifeguards called an ambulance and police. When police arrived they found the young Iraqi enjoying himself by the swimming pool and arrested him.
During interrogation, the Iraqi migrant told police that he knew that what he did was wrong and that he had made a “big mistake.” He admitted that he knew he had left a “big scar on the boy.”
He also said he knew that having sex with a 10-year-old boy was “forbidden in any country of the world,” and that no country tolerates such crime.
But he said that after having been starved of sex for months he had too much “sexual energy” that he had no choice but “follow his desire.”
According to The Telegraph, the 20-year-old Iraqi had arrived in Austria via the Balkans on September 5 and worked in the city as a taxi driver. He said that his state of “excess of sexual energy” was exacerbated by the fact that he left his girlfriend in Iraq. He said he was not able to have sex with the woman because she took ill after giving birth to their baby.
By the time he reached Austria, he had reached the limits of his endurance and could no longer “withstand not having sex” because he “had a marked surplus of sexual energy.”
The attack took place on December 2 but police authorities said they did not release details of the incident earlier to “protect the [underage] victim.”
Police reportedly said that although there had to be zero-tolerance of rape it was also necessary for police to be sensitive about cases involving migrants who had “been through a lot” in their country.
But after reports about the crime emerged on Facebook, police were forced to release an official detailed report. The Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung had also reported the incident in December without official confirmation of the details by police.
Police spokesperson Thomas Keiblinger denied claims that police deliberately withheld information about the crime to avoid fuelling public resentment against immigrants.
Keiblinger also reportedly said that the fact that the man was a migrant “played no role whatsoever” in his crime.
The Iraqi migrant remains in police custody.
The Telegraph notes that figures obtained from the Austrian federal agency for statistics show that there were 126 rape convictions in Austria in 2014. About 58.7 percent of the rape crimes were committed by Austrian citizens and about 34.9 percent by non-EU citizens.
The latest shocking incident comes after reports in the Austrian media of a case involving a 13-year-old girl who was being repeatedly raped by a 26-year-old man. The man claimed he had married the underage girl in Syria under Islamic law and thus had the right to have sex with her.
It also comes after German police said last month that they were hunting for gangs of more than a thousand men of “Arab and North African origin” who sexually assaulted dozens of women during New Year celebrations outside the Cologne main train station.
[Photo By Boris Grdanoski/AP]