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CRIME

Life sentence for murder of transgender woman

A 32-year-old man has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the brutal murder of a transgender asylum seeker in Vienna in January.

Published: 4 September 2015 16:12 CEST
Life sentence for murder of transgender woman
Police at the scene of the crime. Photo: APA

Hande Ö (34), who had been secretly working as a prostitute, was strangled in her home in Ottakring on January 19th.

Judge Ulrich Nachtlberger said that a life sentence was “appropriate” as there was no doubt that the defendant was guilty and meant “to destroy his victim”.

His lawyer had tried to plead manslaughter. The accused said that he and Hande Ö had “fought” after having sex, and that she had attacked him with her long fingernails, scratching him in the cheek. He said he had never meant to kill her and had thought she was just unconscious.

The accused had visited Hande Ö three times, paying her for sex. Weighing around 130 kilos, he had easily overpowered the much smaller woman, tying her hands behind her back and strangling her with her own clothes. A coroner's report showed that the woman had suffered similar injuries to hanging victims.

€3,000 was missing from her apartment, along with two smartphones.

The 32-year-old man was arrested at the end of January after committing two robberies, and DNA evidence linked him to the murder.

Hande Ö was born in Turkey but fled the country last year after being persecuted, and applied for asylum in Austria. Her body was discovered five days after she was murdered.

TERRORISM

Austrian investigators seize devices at Munich shooter’s home

Investigators seized electronic devices at the home of a young Austrian who fired shots near Israel's Munich consulate, but found no weapons or Islamic State group propaganda material, authorities said Friday.

Published: 7 September 2024 09:02 CEST
Austrian investigators seize devices at Munich shooter's home

German police shot dead the 18-year-old man on Thursday when he fired a vintage rifle at them near the diplomatic building.

They said they were treating it as a “terrorist attack”, apparently timed to coincide with the anniversary of the killings of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games.

Authorities raided the gunman’s home in the Salzburg region, seizing electronic data carriers, Austria’s top security chief Franz Ruf told a press conference in Vienna on Friday.

READ ALSO: Munich Israeli consulate gunman was ‘Austrian national known to authorities’

During the raid, “no weapons or IS propaganda” material were found, Ruf added.

Despite being subject to a ban on owning and carrying weapons, the man managed to purchase a vintage carbine rifle fitted with a bayonet with around “fifty rounds of ammunition” for 400 euros ($445) the day before the attack, Ruf said.

He opened fire at around 9:00 am (0700 GMT) near the Israeli consulate, sparking a mobilisation of about 500 police in downtown Munich.

At a separate press conference in Munich, prosecutor Gabriele Tilmann said investigators were combing through the gunman’s electronic data but had yet to find conclusive evidence of his motive.

But the “working hypothesis” was that “the perpetrator acted out of Islamist or anti-Semitic motivation”, she told reporters.

Austrian police said on Thursday that the gunman, who had Bosnian roots, had previously been investigated on suspicion of links to terrorism.

Investigators last year found three videos he had recorded in 2021, showing scenes from a computer game “with Islamist content”, prosecutors said in a statement.

In one of them the suspect had used an avatar with a flag of the “al-Nusra Front”, a jihadist group active in Syria, said Ruf.

But the investigation was dropped in 2023 as there were no indications that he was active in “radical” circles, prosecutors said.

“The mere playing of a computer game or the re-enactment of violent Islamist scenes was not sufficient to prove intent to commit the offence,” they added.

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