The lay judges at the Vienna Criminal Court deliberated for hours on Friday, and the facts were largely clear. Three young men of Afghan origin, one of them already grown up at the time of the crime, two still teenagers, had sold drugs to a 13-year-old girl in June 2021, then raped her one after the other in the apartment of one of the perpetrators and later left the presumed dead victim on the street. Six ecstasy tablets were given to the teenager; the girl ultimately died of a fatal overdose, according to the autopsy.
The two dealers should have known that such a dose could be lethal
The “Leonie case”, named after the dead young woman from Lower Austria, caused a stir far beyond Vienna – because the perpetrators were migrants, because two of them used to deal drugs because they abused the young girl – and had not saved her. The verdict was finally reached on Friday evening. The fact that the court’s deliberations had dragged on may ultimately have been due to a central legal question: Was the act a rape with fatal consequences – or murder? Had the perpetrators approved of the teenager’s death, knowing they had overdosed the thirteen-year-old? This consideration had no significant influence on the prison sentences; however, the family attorney noted that the issue at stake was a matter of principle: the two dealers should have known that such a dose of drugs could be lethal.
The verdict was then unequivocal: for the main defendant it was premeditated murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The other two defendants were convicted of murder by omission and rape, each carrying a 20-year sentence. The judgments are not final.
The three young men, Zubaidullah R., 24, Ibraulhaq A., 19, and Ali H., 20, had accused each other of the crime during interrogation; in her own case, however, the sex was “consensual”. One of the three accused testified that Leonie looked at him with tears in her eyes while an accomplice abused her, but that he did not feel responsible for her rescue. After all, she wasn’t “his girlfriend”.
According to the indictment, her boyfriend at the time, who was also the tenant of the apartment where the girl was drugged, had harassed her first. Then the three men mixed her six ecstasy tablets in a drink. The subsequent abuse of the now defenseless was also documented by videos that were shown behind closed doors during the trial. In order to cover up the crime, according to the public prosecutor, the three young Afghans finally carried Leonie W. out of the apartment, leaned against a tree and called the emergency doctor. At that point, however, she was already dead.
One of the perpetrators fled to London after Leonie’s death
Zubaidullah R., Ibraulhaq A. and Ali H. are said to have shown no remorse during the previous six days of the hearing. Before the verdict on Friday, the three men apologized to the family, although mutual accusations were again in the foreground: “If I had known that I had false friends, I would never have taken them there,” said one of the three. Another perpetrator fled to London after Leonie’s death, but was caught and extradited there. He said on the last day of the trial that he was “forced” to deal in drugs to earn money.
The last day of the trial was also particularly emotional because the parents of the murdered remembered their daughter and described their pain. Leonie’s father had given lawyer Johannes Öhlböck photos and a letter to read. It remains an “infinite grief that will probably never end,” it said.
The victims’ lawyers also used their pleas to refer to the high number of femicides in Austria, 63 in 2021 alone. “The killing of Leonie on June 26, 2021 does not record the statistics. Leonie was not yet a woman. She was 13 years old : a child, a sister, a classmate at the new middle school in Tulln. Leonie would have celebrated her 15th birthday this year,” says Öhlböck.