Muslim refugees housed in Swiss brothel

On the ground floor of the Erotic Hotel Venus, a brothel that has been around for some 20 years, seven Romanian and Hungarian women serve guests with drinks at the bar, or entertain them in the strip bar. If the men want sexual services, they’re taken to the first floor.

But sitting on the second floor, drinking black tea and trying to make plans for their futures, are 11 Muslim asylum seekers, newspaper Blick reports.

Beat Schlierenzauer, the man responsible for placing the men there, maintains he did not know when he first looked at the rooms that they were in a brothel.

“They met our requirements exactly,” he said. Having later discovered what the rest of the building was being used for, he then avoided housing women and children there.

The brothel's landlady, Mrs. Wyss, complains that having asylum seekers in the building has hurt trade. Nevertheless, the men keep themselves to themselves and do not have anything to do with the women.

“I think the men are more afraid of us than we are of them,” she said.

The asylum seekers know what the women do, but have no desire to talk about it other than to describe the situation as as alien, unpleasant, and “noisy”.

"If an applicant is not satisfied with his accommodation, he can have it checked,” Bernard Koch, member of the Swiss Christian People's Party in the Thurgauer government, told Blick. "But the people living in Switzerland have to get used to our rules. And prostitution is legal. "