On March 5, Nadine, 35, is in her small 12 square meter tobacco shop on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria, which she has managed for years. Her ex-companion, named Ashraf, comes in, locks the door, closes the blinds, hits her, then strangles her with an electric cable. He sprinkles it with gasoline before lighting the fire. The 47-year-old man leaves the scene, closing the door behind him. As he starts his car, smoke alerts passers-by, who must smash windows to try to intervene. Taken to the emergency room, Nadine died a month later in hospital.
On April 29, in one of these HLMs which are usually the pride of the Austrian capital, Marija, 36, nurse, is at home at the beginning of the evening. In circumstances that remain to be clarified, Albert, the man with whom she has had a complicated relationship for years, shoots her in the legs and in the head. The police arrive and immediately arrest Albert. He is so drunk that he must also be taken to the hospital, where his ex-girlfriend will die overnight. She was the mother of two children.
Occurring a few weeks apart, these two feminicides, to which is added the double murder, on May 5, by a former companion, of a woman and her mother near Salzburg, shook Austria.
By wondering about the reasons for this macabre series, the small Alpine Republic suddenly rediscovered that with more than thirty feminicides registered each year, including eleven for 2021, the country of barely nine million inhabitants is far from d ” be exemplary in this area.
Insufficient measures
In addition to a proportionately higher female violent death rate, for example, than that of France, Austria is also one of the few countries in Europe where more women than men are murdered each year. This is certainly the sign of organized crime very little active in its territory, but the daily left Der Standard titled “The land of dead women”.
Started by author and musician Gerhard Ruiss, a petition signed by more than 200 Austrian artists, entitled ” This concerns us all ”, denounced “Insufficient measures” of the government “To prevent such monstrous murders from happening again”.
The conservative chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, 34, in fact initially reacted weakly. Whoever prefers to avoid the term “feminicide” to speak of “Murder of women” called a government conference, which was reached on May 3 to “Improve information exchange” between services.
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