Authorities in the French city of Rennes have arrested two adult men from Afghanistan after the pair allegedly sexually assaulted a woman and stabbed her ex-boyfriend who selflessly stepped in to protect her.
The two suspects, aged 19 and 25, both of whom were born in Afghanistan, were arrested last week in Rennes, the capital city of Brittany, in Northwest France. The men are suspected of having stabbed the man near the metro station after sexually assaulting his ex-girlfriend, the daily newspaper Ouest-France reports.
The attack unfolded at around midnight on July 10th, when the male suspects accosted the woman and grabbed her buttocks near the Charles-de-Gaulle metro station. The male victim, after stepping in to protect his girlfriend, was then stabbed multiple times in the back, causing him to temporarily lose consciousness.
“As they fled, the 40-year-old victim realized he was losing blood and had a wound in his lower back,” public prosecutor Philippe Astruc explained. “The emergency services took care of him and the bleeding was stopped.”
“A kidney wound was clearly evident,” Astruc added.
After being transported to the local hospital by emergency services, the male victim then underwent emergency surgery to treat the multiple stab wounds that he had received during the attack.
French authorities have since launched an official investigation into the criminal act. Until the trial, which is set to begin on September 20th, the two suspects will remain in police custody.
Since the beginning of the migrant crisis in 2015, Afghan migrants have been vastly overrepresented in crime data recorded, compiled, and released by police, non-profits, and government agencies.
As Remix News reported last October, Afghan migrants living in Germany were the third most common suspects for violent crimes in 2019, making up 7.5 percent of all perpetrators suspected of having committed violent crimes in the country, according to data from the German Federal Ministry of the Interior.
At the end of last month, two Afghan migrants, aged 16 and 18, who prosecutors believe were involved in the brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl in Vienna, were arrested by Austrian police. Investigators confirmed that the two men drugged the girl and raped her repeatedly, before going on to murder her. Prior to the rape and murder, the 18-year-old suspect, who first arrived in Austria in 2015 at the height of the migrant crisis, had been known to police. Despite being convicted for various criminal offenses in 2017, he was never imprisoned or deported.
The case, which sparked widespread outrage across the country, prompted Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz to announce that current deportation rates of Afghan migrants would be maintained by the government and that asylum laws wouldn’t be relaxed to accommodate more migrants.
“We will not stop deportations to Afghanistan, and we will not ease the asylum law,” the 34-year-old Austrian Chancellor said, adding that the migrants who commit crimes in Austria “should not be supported in the name of false tolerance, but should be deported as soon as possible.”
