On Thursday afternoon, the regional court in Linz did not extend the detention of four young people who are said to have raped a 16-year-old schoolgirl near Linz’s main train station. The three 15-year-old Afghans and a 14-year-old Iranian are up again free Foot, a court spokeswoman announced the result of the detention hearing. She could not provide any information about the reasons with reference to the ongoing proceedings.
During the investigation, the police have meanwhile evaluated the recordings of several surveillance cameras at the main train station, which, according to the spokeswoman for the public prosecutor’s office Ulrike Breiteneder, only show parts of the event and this without sound. Accordingly, the later victim arrived in the late afternoon of March 30 by tram at the main station. The 16-year-old looked briefly at her cell phone and then walked towards a group of boys, which also included one of the alleged perpetrators. Then they walked out of the picture separately. There are no signs of violence in the footage. The later victim should therefore not have been abducted by force from the train station to the scene of the crime in the former postal distribution center. There are also no witnesses who observed such a scene. Because the Hauptbahnhof area is a busy place, it seems unlikely that nobody would have noticed.
The investigation also revealed that the student was in contact with one of the later suspects via a social network days before the crime. However, this app deletes the communication immediately, so nothing more can be said about the content, according to the public prosecutor. The questioning of the victim, which is planned in the form of an adversarial questioning, is to take place after Easter.
The four suspects have not confessed. Two maintain that the sexual acts were consensual. The third only wants to have watched, the fourth is silent.
