An Appalling Story With a (Relatively) Happy Ending

We wrote here about the horrific case of a 10-year-old boy in Vienna who was raped by an Iraqi refugee at a swimming pool:

At the pool, Amir A. dragged the schoolboy, aged ten, into the changing rooms where he locked the door and violently sexually assaulted him, leaving him in need of urgent treatment at a local children’s hospital. …

Amir A., who had worked in Iraq as a taxi driver, was still clothed in swimwear when handcuffed. He confessed to the rape, saying he knew it was wrong but did it anyway because it was a “sexual emergency” as he had not had sex for four months.

At that time, Amir A. had been sentenced to six years in prison, but his sentence was overturned by an appellate court that thought rape hadn’t been proved: Amir might have thought the boy consented.

That was outrageous, but the story has taken a turn for the better: on retrial, the court has sentenced Amir to seven years rather than six:

His lawyers had sought a retrial after successfully arguing that the original trial had not done enough to discover if he knew for certain that his victim was saying no.

The appeal had shocked legal experts because as a 10-year-old minor, the victim could never have given his consent to sex.

Now judges at Austria’s Supreme Court have found the asylum seeker guilty for a second time – and jailed him for seven years.

That’s nowhere near long enough, of course. Nor is the 5,000 Euros the boy has been awarded for his “horrendous injuries” even remotely adequate. But it is a small step in the right direction, and a reminder of why so many Europeans–including those who are not by any sane definition “far right”–have misgivings about mass immigration from Islamic countries.

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