A 24-year-old Polish woman, identified as Klaudia K., succumbed to fatal injuries sustained after being brutally attacked by a 19-year-old Venezuelan in the central Polish city of Toruń earlier this month. She died on Friday, June 27th, after fighting for her life for two weeks in hospital.
The assault occurred in the early hours of June 12th, as Klaudia was walking home from her shift as a barmaid. The attacker, Yomeykert R.-S., reportedly brutally raped her and stabbed her dozens of times in the head, neck, and chest with a knife. A passerby heard her screams, intervened, and frightened the assailant, allowing emergency services to arrive.
The perpetrator, who arrived in Poland in February as a legal migrant, was arrested shortly after the assault. He could be sentenced to life in jail.
The horrific nature of the crime has triggered public outrage and anti-immigration protests in Toruń, with demonstrators calling for stricter border controls.
The news of the brutal attack comes as ordinary citizens are taking law and order into their own hands: self-declared “citizen patrols”—some of them hundreds strong—have gathered on the Polish side of the border with Germany to oppose returns of migrants whom the German authorities have found to have entered illegally from Poland.
Over the last two years, Germany has sent back thousands of such migrants, prompting a growing backlash in Poland. The opposition conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party believes the Donald Tusk-led leftist-liberal government is doing too little to stop migration.
