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CRIME

Outrage over ruling on ‘brutal’ gang rape of teen girl

A 14-year-old girl was gang-raped and left partially clothed and unconscious in freezing temperatures. Now prosecutors are appealing the sentences for the young men found guilty, most of whom will not set foot in jail.

Published: 24 October 2016 16:54 CEST
Outrage over ruling on 'brutal' gang rape of teen girl
The now convicted suspects, sitting in court in Hamburg. Photo: DPA.

Hamburg state prosecutors said on Monday that they are appealing the sentences against several young men, found guilty last week of raping a 14-year-old girl.

“We want the mild verdict to be reassessed as to whether it is legally wrong,” state prosecutors’ spokeswoman Nana Frombach told broadcaster NDR.

Four young men between the ages of 14 and 21 had gotten the girl drunk in February, raped her and then left her outside – partially clothed and unconscious – in freezing temperatures. A 15-year-old girl filmed the rape on a cell phone and gave the others directions.

When the 14-year-old girl was found, she was hypothermic with a body temperature of 35.4C (95.7F) and had to be treated by a hospital’s intensive care unit. Initially state prosecutors had wanted to also investigate the case as attempted murder, according to NDR.

The Hamburg regional court observed in its ruling that the offenders had “thrown the girl away like garbage” and sentenced four of the five offenders to suspended sentences of between one to two years on Thursday.

Only the 21-year-old involved was sentenced to four years in prison because he was tried as an adult. In Germany, juvenile law operates under a principle of education rather than punishment.

NDR reports that relatives and friends of the convicted cheered when the sentences were announced in court.

Since the ruling, outrage has erupted online over the suspended sentences, similar to that seen in the US when former Stanford student athlete Brock Turner was convicted of sexual assault and served just three months in prison.

The lead judge, Georg Halbach, said that while the “sentences may seem mild to the public,” the offenders aged between 14 and 17 had made credible confessions, appeared remorseful and had good social prospects. Some of them are to be placed in youth centres, or in therapy.

A petition was started on Change.org to appeal the Hamburg court’s sentence, garnering more than 20,000 signatures as of Monday afternoon. Prosecutors said the petition did not have an influence on their decision to appeal.

“It cannot be that a four-person gang rape of a 14-year-old girl ends with a suspended sentence, in particular because the girl was left in the cold like a piece of meat and half-naked,” the petition states.

“The ‘future prospects’ of the perpetrators and the educational ideals of juvenile laws can and should not result in a brutal gang rape of a helpless 14-year-old being swept aside. The sexual self-determination and integrity of a woman must have more weight here than concerns for the perpetrators.”

Low rates of conviction 

Germany has reexamined its rape laws in recent years, after a high-profile case involving a TV model, as well as numerous sexual assaults reported on New Year's Eve last year.

Judges had long interpreted the laws as requiring victims to show proof of physical resistance to consider a case as rape.

But in July, the German parliament approved tougher “no means no” measures to cover victims who for various reasons may not have physically fought back.

Before this, the requirement to prove physical resistance was blamed for contributing to the country's low rape conviction rate: a 2014 study by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony found that the conviction rate of accused rapists had dropped from 21.6 percent in 1994 to 8.4 percent in 2012.

CRIME

Germany arrests Syrian man accused of plotting to kill soldiers

German authorities said Friday they had arrested a 27-year-old Syrian man who allegedly planned an Islamist attack on army soldiers using two machetes in Bavaria.

Published: 13 September 2024 11:17 CEST
Germany arrests Syrian man accused of plotting to kill soldiers

The suspect, an “alleged follower of a radical Islamic ideology”, was arrested on Thursday on charges of planning “a serious act of violence endangering the state”.

The man had acquired two heavy knives “around 40 centimetres (more than one foot) in length” in recent days, prosecutors in Munich said.

He planned to “attack Bundeswehr soldiers” in the city of Hof in northern Bavaria during their lunch break, aiming “to kill as many of them as possible”, prosecutors said.

“The accused wanted to attract attention and create a feeling of insecurity among the population,” they said.

German security services have been on high alert over the threat of Islamist attacks, in particular since the Gaza war erupted on October 7th with the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Police shot dead a man in Munich this month after he opened fire on officers in what was being treated as a suspected “terrorist attack” on the Israeli consulate in Munich.

The shootout fell on the anniversary of the kidnap and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games by Palestinian militants.

The 18-year-old suspect had previously been investigated by authorities in his home country Austria on suspicion of links to terrorism but the case had been dropped.

The incident capped a string of attacks in Germany, which have stirred a sense of insecurity in Germany and fed a bitter debate of immigration.

Three people were killed last month in a suspected Islamist stabbing at a festival in the western city of Solingen.

READ ALSO: ‘Ban asylum seekers’ – How Germany is reacting to Solingen attack

The suspect in the attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State group, was a Syrian man who had been slated for deportation from Germany.

A federal interior ministry spokesman said if an Islamist motive was confirmed in the latest foiled attack, it would be “further evidence of the high threat posed by Islamist terrorism in Germany, which was recently demonstrated by the serious crimes in Mannheim and the attack in Solingen, but also by acts that were fortunately prevented by the timely intervention of the security authorities”.

The Solingen stabbing followed a knife attack in the city of Mannheim in May, which left a policeman dead, and which had also been linked to Islamism by officials.

Germany has responded to the attacks by taking steps to tighten immigration controls and knife laws.

READ ALSO: Debt, migration and the far-right – the big challenges facing Germany this autumn

The government has announced new checks along all of its borders and promised to speed up deportations of migrants who have no right to stay in Germany.

The number of people considered Islamist extremists in Germany fell slightly from 27,480 in 2022 to 27,200 last year, according to a report from the federal domestic intelligence agency.

But Interior Minister Nancy Faeser warned in August that “the threat posed by Islamist terrorism remains high”.

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