Europe has been beset with a number of public rapes in recent months involving foreigners, with a series of rapes in public areas hitting the Saxon city of Chemnitz. In the latest case, according to police, a 20-year-old woman said an Arab-looking man raped her right on the street while she was walking near the city’s town hall.
The 20-year-old was walking home from the city center when a stranger approached her and began to follow her for a long period of time. At approximately 9:00 p.m., the man jumped her at Moritz Strasse and Zschopauer Strasse just 500 meters from the town hall. According to the Chemnitz police, the man performed “sexual acts” on the woman.
The rape victim freed herself and ran from the scene of the crime. Witnesses saw the suspect run away in the other direction and called the police. Police descended on the scene but were unable to find the man. Armed with a description of the suspect, the police are calling for the public help to identify the man.
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The victim describes the man as having an Arab appearance, 1.65 meters tall (5’4″), and wearing light colored jeans and a black and white T-shirt, according to German news outlet Stern.
“He has an Arab appearance with black hair that was cut very short on the sides,” said the Chemnitz police department in a press release on Sunday.
However, this is only one of three rapes on public streets that has hit the city in recent months. On Aug. 28, a 24-year-old was sexually assaulted near the city’s train station. The woman was able to free herself and fled. The police are investigating the case as an attempted rape. The description of the perpetrator: around 25 to 30 years old, 1.70 to 1.80 meters tall, slim, short, dark and slightly curly hair, “from the Arabic area.”
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Seven weeks earlier, in July, a 19-year-old girl was raped in the southwest of the city. She fled after the attack. Police describe the perpetrator as “a 1.70 meters tall Black male, slim, black-haired, and a full beard.”
In the Austrian capital of Vienna, there were three separate rapes in under a week involving migrant men, leading the country’s main conservative opposition party, the Freedom Party (FPÖ), to condemn the growing lack of security for women on the streets. In each case, a woman was attacked at random while walking through Vienna. After an FPO politician criticized the failure of the police to maintain security in the city, his account was suspended on Twitter.
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Italy has also seen a wave of rapes involving migrant men over the years, including in very public areas. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s was censored on Twitter after she shared a video depicting a migrant man raping an Italian woman in broad daylight just shortly before last month’s election.
The German city of Chemnitz features a strong movement against mass immigration. After asylum seekers stabbed a man and critically injured another at the city festival in 2018., protests broke out in the city, which were sharply condemned by politicians. President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, also lost his position over the protests because he contradicted then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s claim that foreigners were being “hunted” in the city.
