Vienna reels from a rare terrorist attack

He was armed with an automatic rifle, a pistol, a machete and a dummy suicide belt. For nine minutes, the 20-year-old gunman turned the cobbled streets of central Vienna into a war zone, firing so many shots from so many places that officials initially believed there were multiple attackers.

By the time the police shot him Monday night, he had killed four people and wounded 23, shocking a country where deadly terrorist attacks are rare.

But the shooter, a 20-year-old dual citizen of Austria and North Macedonia, was well known to the authorities. Two years ago, he was sentenced to prison for attempting to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State group, raising questions about whether someone so firmly on the radar of Austria’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies should have been more closely watched.

In addition, Slovakian authorities alerted Austria in July that he had travelled to Slovakia to try to buy ammunition for his AK-47, a senior Austrian official confirmed Tuesday.

Few details have been released about how the shooting unfolded or who the victims were, but officials have identified six locations in one neighbourhood where they say shots were fired.

The dead, who have yet to be publicly identified, include three Austrians and one German, and range in age from 19 to 34, the senior official said. Little is known about them other than one was a young man who was shot on the street, another a waitress in a bar. Among the wounded was a 28-year-old police officer.

Monday’s violence comes after recent terrorist attacks in France — including the beheading of a teacher near Paris and a knife attack at a church in Nice — that have both been linked to Islamist extremists.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria said in an address to the nation Tuesday that the shooting was “definitely an Islamist terrorist attack,” which he called “an attack out of hatred, hatred for our basic values.”

But Kurz, his interior minister and the mayor of Vienna all vowed that the attacker would not divide Austrian society or alter Austrians’ way of life. The chancellor warned against making assumptions about Austria’s Muslim community.

Two Turkish-Austrians and a Palestinian who braved the gunfire to bring an older woman to safety and help save the life of the 28-year-old police officer, were celebrated in the Austrian media as heroes.

The interior minister and the police said investigators were still reconstructing the events of the previous evening, trying to determine how just one attacker, as they now believe, could have been responsible for the gunshots recorded at all six locations identified as scenes of the crime.

Barely 24 hours after the assault, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack, calling the shooter a “soldier of the caliphate,” according to a statement translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremist messaging.

It was not clear from the claim whether the terrorist group had helped plan the attack or if others were involved. The Islamic State group has used similar language before in asserting responsibility for assaults by individuals acting on their own.

Two years ago, the attacker, Kujtim Fejzulai, then 18, had planned to travel to Syria with a friend to join the Islamic State group, his former lawyer, Nikolas Rast said. When the friend changed his mind, he went on his own. But he made it only as far as Turkey, where he was arrested and taken back to Vienna to face charges of attempted jihad and attempting to join a terrorist organisation.

He was convicted and sentenced to 22 months in prison, but was released in December, after serving only about a year.

Rast, who represented Fejzulai at the trial, said that his client’s good behaviour in prison — he even took part in a de-radicalisation program — led to his early release.

But evidence found in the suspect’s home Tuesday, including a stockpile of ammunition, indicated that since his release from prison he appears to have led a double life — presenting himself to the world as fully integrated into society, while embracing a radical ideology in private, Karl Nehammer, the Austrian interior minister, said in a news conference Tuesday.

“There were no warning signs about his radicalisation,” Nehammer said.

But apparently the Austrian authorities missed at least one, the notification from Slovakia that Fejzulai had travelled there in search of ammunition for an AK-47. He failed to buy any because he could not produce a gun license.

Investigators also believe he worshipped at a mosque that Austrian intelligence services suspect of promulgating extremism, an official said.

Sometime before the attack, Fejzulai posted a photograph of himself to social media, wielding a machete and a rifle with a message that “clearly indicated his sympathy for IS,” the minister said, using an abbreviation for the Islamic State.

Kurz vowed to shed light on how a man whose militant aspirations had come to the attention of the authorities in 2018 was able to slip through the net.

“The attacker tried to join the Islamic State some time ago and was arrested and convicted,” Kurz said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “He was in prison and was released early. We need to get to the bottom of why the justice system let this attacker go early.”

At least 14 people in Austria who have been linked to the suspect have been detained and are being questioned, and 18 locations are being searched, Nehammer said. The police in Switzerland said they had detained two men, ages 18 and 24, on suspicion of a connection to the attacker in Vienna, but gave no further details.

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