An Austrian asylum seeker stabbed a 50-year-old Christian woman Wednesday after he heard her read the Bible out loud at a refugee shelter.
The incident took place in the Timelkam municipality in Upper Austria state.
After further investigation, the attacker claimed that he attacked the woman due to his own “personal problems.” He also cleared that he had not even seen the victim before.
According to the police, the woman and her husband had been invited to the accommodation to read the Bible for its Christian residents when the angered Afghan man entered the kitchen and stabbed the woman with a butter knife. The woman fell backwards and hurt her ear but her thick coat protected her from serious injury.
Later, the attacker was detained by police and imprisoned in the city of Wels, some 35 kilometres from Timelkam.
Around 700,000 migrants entered Austria last year and about 90,000 applied for asylum in the country sitting on the migrant route from Turkey via Greece and the Balkans to Germany. Afghans constitute the largest national group seeking asylum in Austria.
In 2015, an asylum seeker from Iraq identified as Amir raped a 10-year-old boy at a swimming pool in Vienna. The man later told the police he had had a “sexual emergency”.
In September last year, police in northern Austria detained five migrants from Afghanistan over accusations of sexually harassing women during a wine festival in the city of Wels.The four of the alleged perpetrators appeared to be unaccompanied teenage refugees, aged between 15 and 16, while the fifth was 22 years old.