Victim from Klagenfurt

Investigators busy with dubious abduction case

The alleged victim was picked up in this parking lot.(Bild: Klaus Loibnegger)

Kidnapped in Graz, abducted to Slovenia and finally abandoned by the perpetrators in Klagenfurt - at least that is the version of the alleged victim.

Swollen nose, bloodstains on his face - this is how the Syrian man registered in Carinthia was picked up by the police on Monday afternoon in a supermarket parking lot in Klagenfurt. And the alarm bells rang when he was checked in the search system: The man (28) had been reported missing by his wife 24 hours earlier.

The husband was supposed to have visited her four days earlier in Graz - where, according to his own statements, the alleged victim was incapacitated by seven men with a stun gun on the woman's doorstep, put in the trunk of a BMW and taken to Slovenia. There, the gang then tied up the Syrian, beat him in a small room and forced him to call his father in Syria.

At first glance, the alleged course of events seems implausible. But the investigation will bring the truth to light.

so ein Ermittler zur „Krone“

A ransom of 100,000 US dollars was demanded. Which the father of the alleged victim could not possibly pay - whereupon the alleged kidnappers "obligingly" decided to let their victim, who lived in Klagenfurt, go and bring her back to Carinthia.

Victim abandoned after crossing the border
Where the gang had abandoned him in the village of Zell, near the Slovenian border. The perpetrators had also chauffeured his car, which had been seized in Carinthia, in Klagenfurt, from Graz to the "place of torture" and "kindly" back to Klagenfurt (at least according to the Syrian).

A dubious kidnapping case, which is now also on the table of the Styrian investigators due to the missing persons report originally filed in Graz - and rightly raises some questions: Why would the kidnappers take the victim's car? And bring it, as well as the victim herself, back to Austria?