First, a jealous husband shot his wife while she slept and cut her body into pieces with a power saw. Then a suicidal snake dealer threatened to kill himself with his cobras and swung the serpents at police officers. Now Vienna police have arrested a man suspected of using two hand grenades to blow up a woman in the capital's fabled forest.
| Sounds like a typical week in Multan or Quetta... |
A week of death on a scale virtually unheard-of in Austria has people on edge in this usually tranquil country better known for Mozart than for murder. "It's getting to the point where I'm afraid to leave the house — and that's a completely new feeling for me," said Doris Mueller, a housewife in Vienna. Statistics suggest she has cause for concern: Last year, authorities investigated 257,090 criminal complaints in Vienna, up 21.5 percent from 2002, according to the most recent figures from the Interior Ministry. Things are not totally out of control yet. Austria's murder rate is about 1.17 deaths per 100,000, compared to 5.7 in the United States and 75.3 for the world's leader, South Africa. But Vienna, like any major city, has always had its crime. And the grisly events of the past week have startled even the most cynical residents, along with expatriates accustomed to giving their children far more freedom than they'd ever feel comfortable doing in London or Los Angeles. "There's a very aggressive mentality," said Radek Zampa, an artist who moonlights as a waiter in the city of 2 million. "There's something angry in people's eyes. People, it turns out, can be very dangerous."
| Really, Radek? When did that start? |
Last week's dismemberment slaying was especially jarring. Police said the suspect, convinced his wife was cheating on him, pumped her full of bullets, used a power saw to cut her body into pieces, then stuffed them into trash bins in neighboring Italy. The suspect, whose name was not released in line with strict Austrian privacy laws, concealed the crime by sending text messages from his wife's cell phone to her mother, saying she was vacationing in Paris and having a great time, authorities said.
| "... last week wasn't too good, though." |
On Sunday, two police officers rushed to the apartment of a snake dealer after he sent his own cell phone text message to his girlfriend saying he intended to kill himself. When they arrived, the man was draped with two deadly cobras, and after a failed attempt to subdue him with pepper spray, the patrolmen shot him in the thigh after he allegedly began swinging the snakes at them.
| "You'll never take me alive, coppers!... Ow!" |
One of the snakes bit the man during the struggle, and he remained hospitalized in critical condition Tuesday. Reptile experts called to the scene found more than 60 other poisonous snakes in the apartment, some uncaged and unfed.
| "Jeebus, Fritz! The place is a snake pit!" |
The grenade killing dominated headlines Tuesday, a day after a magazine reporter tipped to the discovery of a large cache of weapons in the famed Vienna Woods showed up with a federal counterterrorism agent and found the body of the victim, a 39-year-old Austrian woman. Authorities said Tuesday they arrested an Austrian man and were treating the case as a homicide.
| Hölmes! How do you do it? |
As much as anything else, it was the scene of the crime that agitated many locals: The Vienna Woods are popular with hikers, picnickers and mushroom hunters and have inspired Johann Strauss, Gustav Klimt and other composers and artists over the centuries.
| "Schatzi, was der helle ist dis?" |
Many people in Austria, where an influx of hundreds of thousands of immigrants has stoked xenophobic sentiment, have already started blaming foreigners for the crime wave. "We've had an increase in imported crime," Interior Minister Ernst Strasser said recently, attributing a rise in armed robberies and other street crime to gangs of Romanian and Bulgarian thugs. Yet all of the people implicated in the past week of violence were Austrians.
| "You, there! In the lederhosen! Schtick 'em ÃŒp!" |
Locals figured into another bizarre crime that surfaced Tuesday, when police in the southern province of Styria said a 30-year-old man tried to beat to death his 64-year-old mother with a hammer. On Sunday evening, an Austrian burst into a Vienna poker party, gunning down his ex-girlfriend's brother and critically wounding her before fatally shooting himself in a stairwell.
| His friends all told him to give the lawn mower back, but would he listen? Neeeiiiin! |
Most of the recent crimes were domestic disputes that couldn't conceivably threaten ordinary citizens. Even so, Brigitte Bierlein, vice president of Austria's Constitutional Court, offered some sober counsel to her countrymen. "My advice to people is to spend their evenings and nights in the carefree comfort of their own homes," she said.
| Ummm... At home? Wasn't that where the guy was waving the snakes? And the guy sawed up his sweetie? Maybe a better idea would be to go out and have a schnitzel and some bier, go for a walk — No! Not in the Vienna Woods! — and relax. |
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