Iran Press/Europe: Christine Aschbacher said she had stepped down to protect her family, complaining of hostility, political agitation, and attacks with unbearable force.
Aschbacher’s 2006 masters thesis displayed plagiarism, incorrect quotations, and lack of knowledge of the German language, alleged blogger Stefan Weber, who specializes in sniffing out academic fraud.
At the time, she graduated with high marks from the University of Applied Sciences in Wiener Neustadt, south of the capital Vienna.
Weber has leveled the same allegations at a thesis she submitted in May last year – in the depths of the first wave of coronavirus – to the Technical University of Bratislava in neighboring Slovakia.
He claimed the work contained “never-before-seen depths of gobbledegook, nonsense and plagiarism” and that more than one-fifth of the text had been lifted from other sources without citations, in particular an article from Forbes magazine.
Academic plagiarism is a regular charge leveled at politicians in the German-speaking world, where leaders often brandish postgraduate qualifications.
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