POLICE are investigating the killing of three women in a legal brothel in Vienna, they announced on Saturday.

The women appear to have been stabbed to death and a man carrying a knife was arrested in the vicinity.

Eva-Maria Holzleitner, women’s spokeswoman for the opposition Social Democrats, called on the government to call a crisis meeting on femicide and demanded “a national action plan to protect against violence.”

The murders underline the extreme risks faced by women in prostitution, even when it is supposedly regulated. Moving a motion passed by the European Parliament last year calling for EU member states to adopt the “Nordic model” — which criminalises the purchase of sex but not prostituted women — German MEP Maria Noichl highlighted the “particularly vulnerable situations” of prostitutes in Germany and Austria, noting that 70 per cent of prostitutes in the EU were of migrant origin and the same proportion, in a Dutch study, were found to have been forced into the sex industry.

Though campaigns for the decriminalisation of “sex work” have gained traction in recent years, including among trade unions, Ms Noichl argued that those who “regard it as professional employment ... only represent a minority of people in prostitution” and that the “majority of people in prostitution ... do not consider it to be a normal job, would leave the sex industry if they could and consider prostitution to be a form of violence.”

The motion, which passed 234-175, called on all EU member states “to ensure that it is punishable as a criminal offence to solicit, accept or obtain a sexual act from a person in exchange for remuneration,” but is non-binding on EU members.