Suspicion of abuse at the Vienna school is expanding

Updated September 27, 2022 | 15:28

Reading time: 2 mins

Presentation of the facts submitted to the Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office

Photo:
APA/GEORG HOCHMUTH

IIn the case of the teacher, who is said to have abused more than two dozen students between the ages of nine and 14 at a Viennese middle school and who took his own life before the planned hearing of the accused in May 2019, there are indications of possible accomplices and to the Assaults dating back to the 1990s. This is ventilated in a statement of facts that was submitted to the Vienna public prosecutor’s office late Monday afternoon.

The spokeswoman for the prosecution, Nina Bussek, confirmed this to the APA on Tuesday. The statement of facts has already been submitted to a public prosecutor for processing. “It is now being examined,” said Bussek.

In the report filed by a team of victims’ representatives, the suspicion of at least two accomplices known by name from the teacher’s environment is assumed, whereby the teacher’s connections to the Viennese sports club scene are shown as well as his previous extracurricular activities. Before he was hired at the Vienna school in 1996, the man is said to have been active in child and youth care since 1990, including many years in a holiday resort on Lake Wolfgang.

Victims and witnesses report the facts of assaults in several federal states. At the school, the teacher is said to have converted a former caretaker’s apartment on the ground floor. Former students report an “authoritarian regime” at the educational institution, and complaints from students and parents have not been investigated. The teaching staff and the board of directors do not want to have heard anything about the events to the detriment of the students.

(SERVICE – Help in the case of sexual abuse of minors, for example under the link of the child protection center “Die Möwe” under https://www.die-moewe.at/kontakt or the Children and Youth Ombudsman Vienna https://kja.at/)

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