Our failure to watch a jihadist

We now know that Austrian intelligence services made a string of “hair-raising” mistakes in the runup to last week’s deadly terrorist attack in central Vienna, said Thomas Mayer. Kujtim Fejzulai— who shot four people dead and wounded 22 others—was sentenced last year to 22 months in prison for conspiring to join ISIS in Syria. He was released after only eight months for good behavior. True, Austrian law allows a would-be jihadist to leave prison early, but one would hope that such a clear threat to society would be kept under strict surveillance. Instead, our counterterrorism authorities somehow failed to notice that he “was

setting up an arsenal at home and had contacts with a network of Islamists.” Even worse, police in neighboring Slovakia this summer alerted Austrian authorities that Fejzulai had crossed the border and tried to buy AK-47 ammunition; his attempt failed because he didn’t have a gun license. Austrian authorities did nothing with the information. Interior Minister Karl Nehammer has labeled that an “intolerable mistake” and has demanded that security services “look more closely” at all such leads. What we really need to examine, though, is the functioning of his ministry, which is tasked with protecting Austrian lives. “It reeks of failure.”