Revealed: The Channel migrant welcomed to Britain and put up in an Ibis hotel, who stands accused of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl in Vienna
At a popular tourist haunt in Vienna, the handsome Afghan refugee in a blue denim shirt and shorts poses by the side of a bridge overlooking the riverboats on the Danube Canal.
The picture of him looking relaxed and confident was taken last summer, just weeks before he became the prime suspect in a crime that has shocked Austria: the drugging, rape and suffocation of 13-year-old schoolgirl Leonie Walner, whose slim body was found wrapped in a roll of carpet dumped under a tree in central Vienna.
Within hours of the terrible discovery, Rasuili Zubaidullah had run away, dodging Austrian police.
He fled hundreds of miles to Dunkirk in France, evading a pan-European manhunt for him before boarding a trafficker’s boat across the Channel to Britain.
Arriving in Dover on the Kent coast, he duped immigration officials by claiming asylum using a false name and was put up by the Government in the Ibis hotel in Whitechapel, East London, which is being used to house migrants.
‘Rebel’ Leonie Walner, pictured, who was seen on CCTV with a group of refugees. Next week, Zubaidullah, who celebrated his 23rd birthday in October, will face a London extradition hearing when Austria demands his return to Vienna for questioning about what court papers state is Leonie’s ‘murder’ during the early hours of Saturday, June 26, at a refugees’ apartment in the city. Her battered corpse was found just 330 yards from the apartment by a passer-by at 6.55am that morning
Acting on a tip-off from Austrian authorities, British police found him hiding in a room at the hotel in late July, little more than a month after Leonie’s life had been snuffed out.
Next week, Zubaidullah, who celebrated his 23rd birthday in October, will face a London extradition hearing when Austria demands his return to Vienna for questioning about what court papers state is Leonie’s ‘murder’ during the early hours of Saturday, June 26, at a refugees’ apartment in the city.
Her battered corpse was found just 330 yards from the apartment by a passer-by at 6.55am that morning.
The Mail has seen Leonie’s official autopsy records, which include DNA samples linking her abused body to Zubaidullah and a group of young male refugees from his country living in Austria, as well as to the apartment and the roll of carpet.
We have tracked his path out of Austria through the city of Innsbruck and across Western Europe by train and bus as he escaped justice with one thing in mind: to reach the UK and evaporate into the overstretched asylum system.
At a popular tourist haunt in Vienna, the handsome Afghan refugee in a blue denim shirt and shorts poses by the side of a bridge overlooking the riverboats on the Danube Canal. The picture of him was taken last summer, just weeks before he became the prime suspect in a crime that has shocked Austria: the drugging, rape and suffocation of 13-year-old schoolgirl Leonie Walner, whose body was found wrapped in a roll of carpet dumped under a tree in central Vienna. Within hours of the discovery, Rasuili Zubaidullah had run away, dodging Austrian police
In northern France this week, Afghans waiting to board boats to Britain remembered Zubaidullah, who walked into a Dunkirk migrant camp on July 8, 12 days after Leonie died.
‘I shared a tent with him when he stayed overnight,’ said Shinwari Kuchi, 35, a former Afghan soldier. ‘He talked about his plan to pay £3,000 to Kurdish traffickers to cross the Channel. He was intent on Britain.
‘He had just arrived when I met him in the charity food queue. He had nowhere to sleep, so I said ‘come into mine [tent]’. He didn’t talk much but when I woke in the morning he had disappeared. I never spotted him again and he didn’t say he was on the run.’
Ten days later, on July 18, Zubaidullah managed to enter Britain under false pretences on a trafficker’s boat.
