Taken to hospital – prisoner set Graz prison on fire

This man is certainly not to be trifled with: the 44-year-old has to serve 15 months in prison for breaking a woman’s ribs and attacking her again a few days later. He also bit a police officer in the right hand when he tried to prevent the violent perpetrator from hitting the already injured woman again.

He is currently serving his sentence in Graz-Jakomini prison. And there too he behaves anything but calmly. As Christian Kroschl, spokesman for the Graz Public Prosecutor’s Office, confirmed, he destroyed a television and an armchair in his detention room in mid-March. However, two days later things got really dangerous; the act could have ended in catastrophe: he set his cell on fire! He did this by setting fire to a plastic box in which prisoners store blankets or razor blades, for example. Meanwhile, the prisoner sat quietly on his bed and continued to drink water.

Prison guards quickly noticed the action. Wearing heavy respiratory protection, they removed the prisoner from the already heavily smoky cell. He was then taken to hospital by the Red Cross. “The fire was noticed early enough by the officials so that worse could be prevented,” says Manfred Ulrich, interim head of the institution, happily. Prison guard trade unionist Mario Raudner also agrees with this in response to a ‘Krone’ request, but criticizes the fact that only one prison guard was temporarily deployed to guard the dangerous man in the psychiatric hospital: ‘The often immediate lifting of security measures poses an additional risk. The problem for the prison guard, who is already affected by a lack of staff, poses an additional risk.”