Vienna reels from a rare terrorist attack
Hewas 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 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.
“The fact is that the terrorist managed to deceive the judicial system’s deradicalization program” to secure his release, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said, adding that the system should be re-evaluated.
The Islamic State group on Tuesday claimed credit for the Vienna attack, calling the perpetrator a “soldier of the Caliphate.” The claim of responsibility was published through the militant group’s media arm, Aamaq.
ISIS also released a video through Aamaq of what is said was Fejzulai, whom it called Abu Dujana al-Albani — apparently a nom de guerre — pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group. It wasn’t clear when the video was filmed.
Few details have been released about how the shooting unfolded or who the victims were, but officials have identified six locations in one neighborhood 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 from19 to 34, a senior government official said.
Little is known about them other than one was a young manwho was shot on the street, another a waitress in a bar. Among the wounded was a 28-year-old police officer.
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.
“This is no fight between Christians and Muslims, or between Austrians and migrants,” Kurz said. “This is a fight between civilization and barbarism.”