Zurich police on Thursday were investigating an alleged skinhead assault on a pregnant Brazilian woman that caused her to miscarry twins and left her scarred with the initials of Switzerland’s main right-wing party.
Details of the attack shocked the Swiss public and prompted Brazilian officials to suggest it was prompted by xenophobia.
Zurich police said details were not yet clear, but a man called on Monday evening to report that a woman at a Zurich train station needed help. When police found her, she had the letters carved into her skin and told them she had suffered a miscarriage after the attack.
PHOTO: EPA
The Brazilian foreign ministry and media reported that three skinheads, one with a Nazi symbol tattooed on his forehead, attacked the woman outside a local train station in Zurich while she was heading home. She had been speaking in Portuguese to her mother on a cellphone when she was accosted.
The Brazilian foreign ministry expressed “great concern” about the attack in a hastily arranged meeting on Thursday in Brasilia with a Swiss diplomats. Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim urged Swiss investigators to act with “transparency” so both countries can learn exactly what happened.
“There is a very strong appearance of xenophobia,” Amorim said.
“The person was not robbed, apparently she was not raped. That shows there was another motivation,” he said.
Pictures of the smiling, pregnant woman were splashed across Brazilian newspapers on Thursday next to those of a bare stomach and legs with the initials SVP — presumably for “Schweizerische Volkspartei” (Swiss People’s Party) — clearly visible in several places.
The woman has been identified by family members as 26-year-old Paula Oliveira, a lawyer working for European shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S.
“What they did to my daughter is like a horror movie,” the woman’s father, lawyer Paulo Oliveira, told Brazil’s Globo TV, adding that she was cut about 100 times in an attack that lasted 10 minutes.
The woman moved to Switzerland several years ago to work for Maersk and was pregnant with twins and planning to soon get married, her uncle Silvio Oliveira said.
The Swiss People’s Party has taken a hardline against immigrants. It has spearheaded campaigns against Swiss integration in Europe and pressed to toughen asylum laws and make it easier to expel foreign nationals.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious