A man in a shark costume who was hired to do some promotional work for an electronics shop has become an unwitting victim of Austria's new burqa ban. The man had been hired on Friday, October 6, by a store called McShark to attract customers.
Two police officers approached him and asked him to remove the shark head.
"I'm just doing my job," he told them, refusing to take it off.
He later removed it but was handed the fine anyway.
"I wasn't aware that the law reaches that far that it also affects mascots," Eugen Prosquill from advertising company Warda Network, which hired the man, told Heute newspaper.
The Warda Network managed to make the most of the phrase "all publicity is good publicity" by posting a photograph of the incident on their Facebook page, with the message: "Life is not simple."
It is unclear if football mascots will be banned from wearing their "heads," but it is understood that police chiefs have ordered their officers not to take action against people wearing Halloween costumes later this month.
Since October 1 it has been illegal to wear a full-face veil in public or cover your face, an offense which is punishable with a 150 euro (US$176) fine.
There are 700,000 Muslims in Austria and only an estimated 100 to 150 Muslim women — 0.002 percent of the population — wear face-covering veils.
"Acceptance and respect of Austrian values are basic conditions for successful cohabitation between the majority [of the] Austrian population and people from third [world] countries living in Austria," said a statement from the government of Austria's Chancellor Christian Kern, issued when the ban came into effect.
Other European countries have introduced similar bans, including France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Bulgaria.
