Scenes from a horror film took place in November last year in a house in Eggersdorf near Graz. According to the indictment, two former prisoners, aged 44 and 50, who had met in prison, assaulted a 55-year-old woman in her own four walls.
The victim of this “home invasion” suffered five knife wounds in the back and was hit so hard with a baseball bat that it broke off. The critically injured survived the attacks. The then only three-year-old granddaughter of the 55-year-old had to witness these violent excesses.
The duo were sentenced to life in prison yesterday on the third and final day of the trial for attempted murder and aggravated robbery. The judgment is not final.
The little girl’s parents spoke on Monday in the jury courtroom. “She still dreams about it and talks about the bad men who hurt grandma,” said the little one’s father, who as a brother-in-law is a relative of the 44-year-old accused.
“A Man with White Hair”
The child keeps telling how the grandmother was repeatedly stabbed in the back with a knife by the “man without hair”. The girl shows the hand movements. The “man with the white hair”, on the other hand, tied up the grandmother, said the three-year-old’s mother.
The granddaughter was also injured in the attack, she suffered a black eye and her face was swollen. Finally, the 55-year-old grandmother was questioned by the Senate yesterday afternoon. She described the brutal attack with remarkable resoluteness. “I immediately thought they might do something to me because one of the two hadn’t worn a mask,” was her thought at the time. She also managed to hide her mobile phone, which she later used to call an ambulance. She soberly described how she was tied up by one of the perpetrators and knelt in front of the sofa in the living room.
“Then it suddenly became very quiet and then it went puff, bang on my skull and I also got a left and right.” Her granddaughter, who was sitting on the sofa right in front of her at the time, began to cry. Then it was quiet again, and “I was already thinking about whether that was it and whether I could call the police on my cell phone,” said the native of Burgenland. But then she heard a gasp and felt a stab in her back. When the perpetrators were gone, she managed to call the emergency services and also described that the robbers must have fled in their car.
“Unpackable, I’m in front of you,” judge Helmut Wlasak enthused about the 55-year-old, who had the presence of mind despite her injuries and apparently acted correctly in fear. The accused stuck to their previous versions: one admitted to the robbery, but denied the attempted murder. His accomplice doesn’t want to have been at the crime scene at all.
Source: Nachrichten
