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When deaths and injuries were reported in central Vienna on Monday night, it first appeared as if a terrorist squad had marched through the streets. The shots rang out in various places within a few minutes: at Morzinplatz, on Fleischmarkt, in Franz-Josephs-Kai, near the synagogue on Seitenstettengasse. Several killers were feared, firing indiscriminately with assault rifles at local visitors and passersby, as five years ago in Paris.
A day later it became increasingly clear that probably only one man fired the shots in Vienna’s nightlife district, killing four people and wounding 22 others: Kujtim F., 20, born in Mödling, near Vienna, owner of an Austrian and a North Macedonian. Passport.
Armed with a Kalashnikov, a pistol and a machete, he went into action. Until a police officer stopped him with a fatal bullet. He wore an explosive belt on his body, but it turned out to be a mannequin. It appears that the attacker planned his own death.
Islamist terrorism is back
It’s still open if there were sponsors or helpers. At night, the terrorist militia “Islamic State” (IS) claimed the attack and described the assassin as a “soldier of the caliphate”. An agency close to the Islamic State published a selfie that apparently shows him with his weapons.
Like the suspected Dresden killer, who stabbed a gay couple on October 4 and killed a man, Kujtim F. had served a youth sentence for terrorist offenses. He was released from prison early, the authorities apparently did not trust him to carry out an attack, a fatal error in judgment.
Dresden, Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, Nice, now Vienna: Islamist terrorism is back in Europe. After the fall of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, it initially seemed that this danger had been contained. Security experts believed that larger coordinated attacks had become less likely.
But the ideology of the Islamists, as the actions of recent weeks show, is not so easy to get out of the minds of their followers. And deluded youth can also commit murderous acts without being trained to kill by a terrorist group.
In an April 2019 Vienna Regional Court ruling, you can read how radicalized Kujtim F. He and a friend from school who was two years older than him visited fundamentalist mosques in Vienna and met Salafi preachers. They consumed even harsher propaganda on the Internet.
This did not go unnoticed by the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Fight against Terrorism: the secret service found that the friends began in early 2018 “to deal intensively with the ideas and ideologies of IS”, as the sentence says. . They came into contact with ISIS members in Syria and Iraq through the Telegram messaging service.
In July 2018, Kujtim F. sent an approximately four minute IS propaganda video through his Telegram account with gunfire, chants and the constantly repeating slogan: “It is time for holy war for God. Let me fight. against the tyrants and the dishonorable, the unbelievers, the true enemy “.
A month later, he and his friend decided to join the terrorist militia branch of ISIS in Afghanistan. But they did not have the necessary visa for the flight from Vienna to Kabul. Then the two of them canceled their tickets.
In the “Safehouse” of the terrorist militia
A week later, Kujtim F. tried to reach the Islamic State alone, this time through Syria. On the morning of September 1, 2018, he boarded a Turkish Airlines plane to Istanbul. From there he traveled to Hatay in the Turkish-Syrian border area. He waited in a hotel until a contact picked him up and took him to a “safe house” of the terrorist organization. According to the verdict, Kujtim F. encountered two Germans and a Belgian there who were apparently also waiting to be smuggled into Syria.
The action was delayed. Kujtim F. was arrested by the Turkish authorities and extradited to Austria. In April 2019, the Vienna Regional Court sentenced him to 22 months in prison for belonging to the terrorist organization IS.
During discussions with the juvenile court help desk, Kujtim F. was “open-minded and approachable” according to the judgment, and was “quite willing to reflect.” He was released in December.
The repentance was evidently only an act. Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said the perpetrator had only faked successful participation in a program to de-radicalize the judiciary in order to be released earlier. Kujtim F. “deceived the program in a brutal, perfidious way,” said the minister. Even after his release, he admitted that he had “made special efforts” with his parole officers.
