Family of eight Iraqi asylum seekers are found guilty of gang-raping 'blind drunk' woman, 28, after luring her away from her friends at New Year's Eve party in Austria

The story comes from The Daily Mail.

Family of eight Iraqi asylum seekers are found guilty of gang-raping 'blind drunk' woman, 28, after luring her away from her friends at New Year's Eve party in Austria

Eight asylum seekers from the same family have been found guilty of gang-raping a German tourist in Austria and jailed for between nine and 13 years.

The Iraqi nationals had gone on trial in the Austrian capital, Vienna, accused of the New Year's Eve 2015 attack on the 28-year-old teacher.

Prosecutors had originally charged nine men with 'abuse of a defenceless person and rape in a very humiliating and agonising way for the victim.'

But the court on Thursday dismissed charges against one of the suspects. A court statement said that the victim has been awarded 25,000 euros in damages.

All eight convicted men - who cannot be deported because Iraq is deemed too unsafe for them to return to - launched immediate appeals against their sentences.

At the opening of the trial in February the court heard how the woman, identified only as Sabine K., was 'blind drunk' when she went with the men to an apartment.

Most of the men deny the charges but DNA from six of them was found in or on her body.

The court heard how the victim arrived in Vienna on December 28, 2015 to spend the New Year with a female friend in the city.

Shortly before midnight on December 31 they wandered into the city centre to join crowds celebrating the arrival of 2016 and at 2am were seen drinking in a bar-restaurant called Cactus.

Shortly before 3am Sabine's friend noticed she was no longer there and was told by another patron that the men she had been talking with had 'taken her away.'

The defendants, aged between 22 and 45, all arrived in Austria between May and December 2015 via the Balkan route.

At the time of the attack, five of them had cemented their right to stay, the applications of the other four were still pending.

Judge Petra Poschalko heard how the woman was taken by four of them to an apartment in Vienna's Rustenschacher Allee, where more men were waiting.

Sabine later said she found herself naked on a double bed being assaulted by the men one after the other.

Her lawyer Karina Fehringer told the court that her client was assaulted in the dark so she could not identify the men.

After the attacks, which went on for several hours, the victim needed in-patient treatment at a trauma clinic and now is under psychiatric care for post traumatic stress disorder.

She had a breakdown before the trial and was too fragile to be in court to face her attackers.

Only one man, Mohamed Al-A., 31, admitted his role in the rapes and he sobbed in court as he said he was 'really drunk' on vodka at the time.

His Muslim faith may forbid him to drink alcoholic beverages, but on New Year's Eve he said he made an exception and drank vodka. 'I was really drunk,' he said, and he further admitted; 'this act is a crime in Iraq.'