tyrol austria
© Sean Gallup/Getty Images
A report from the Austrian region of Tyrol has shown that 47 per cent of all criminal suspects in the first half of the year have been from foreign backgrounds.

Police say that out of the total of 13,360 suspects involved in crimes in the first half of the year, 6,288 came from foreign backgrounds. While overall criminality has gone down by just over 5 per cent, the number of foreign suspects has gone up dramatically since 2009 when foreigners made up 32 per cent of all suspects, Kronen Zeitung reports.

The largest group of offenders were tourists, followed by guest workers, and then asylum seekers with 883 suspects having an asylum seeker background.

In some of the districts of the region, the numbers are even greater. The Landeck district saw 66.9 per cent of criminal suspects coming from foreign backgrounds, largely blamed on the number of winter tourists in the area. The district of Reutte also had a particularly high rate of foreign suspects at 54.4 per cent.

The national average of foreign suspects in Austria is 40.3 per cent, making Tyrol especially high for foreign suspects.

According to a statement by Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka last year, crime committed by asylum seekers had risen by 54 per cent last year nationally. He said that the largest group represented in the statistics were Afghan nationals, followed by Algerians, Moroccans, Nigerians, and Syrians.

Later in the year, he noted that migrant sex attacks had increased even more. Sobotka said that between 2015 and 2016, the number of sex attacks involving migrants as suspects had increased by 133 per cent. Again, the largest group shown in the data was Afghan nationals.

Neighbouring Germany has seen similar statistics in cities like Berlin where migrants and non-Germans are said to be suspects in 45 per cent of the city's criminal cases. In some specific crimes like pickpocketing, non-Germans made up as many as 91 per cent of the suspects.