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Investigators who detained 14 people after the shooting Monday night are trying to gather more information about the shooter’s relatives. That attack became the first in Austria in decades, as well as the first to be attributed to a jihadist.
The attacker, identified as Kujtimas Fejzula, a 20-year-old citizen of Austria and North Macedonia, was sentenced in April last year to prison for trying to go to Syria and join the Islamic State.
However, he was released on probation in December without having served his full sentence of one year and 10 months in prison. Then he was entrusted with the care of organizations specialized in de-radicalization.
The Islamic State jihadist movement, which claimed responsibility for many of the attacks in Europe, said on Tuesday that the shooting, which killed four people and killed several more, was carried out by a “soldier of the caliphate.”
An armed assailant began shooting in the historic city center hours before the Austrian quarantine took effect, as people visited bars and restaurants while enjoying the last night of probation.
Life on the streets of Vienna began to return to normal on Wednesday, in addition to restrictions related to preventing the spread of the coronavirus. However, many schools and shops remain closed after the attack.
“Bad decision
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz called the decision to release Fejzula, who was killed by police on Monday night, “really wrong.”
“If he had not been released, it would not have been possible to carry out a terrorist attack,” Kurzas told the public broadcaster ORF on Tuesday.
Franz Ruf, a senior Austrian public security official, told local media that Fejzula had condemned the recent jihadist attacks in France in the last session of the state-funded de-radicalization program in late October.
Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer admitted on Tuesday that the attacker had managed to “blur” de-radicalization programs to release him prematurely.
According to Nehammer, this case showed that there was a “crack” in the system, and a search at Fejzula’s home revealed much evidence of his radical views.
The minister drew attention to a photo posted on Facebook showing K. Fejzula posing with his “Kalashnikov” machine gun and then holding a machete used during the attack. Certain ISIS slogans have been added to that entry.
The minister also said on Wednesday that Austria’s Internal Intelligence Service had received warnings from neighboring Slovakia that a man sympathetic to the jihadist movement “Islamic State” wanted to acquire ammunition.
“In the last hours, information has come to light that some time before the terrorist attack, Slovak intelligence reported [Austrijos vidaus žvalgybos tarnybą] BVT on the attacker.
“The information was that he wanted ammunition,” he said. “And the next steps were obviously a communication failure.”
Austria’s interior minister on Wednesday accused his far-right predecessor, Herbert Kickl, of doing “long-term damage” to the Internal Intelligence Service by uncovering security vulnerabilities in an investigation into the bloody shootings on Monday.
He said the service was “completely shocked” when Kicklis headed the Interior Ministry while the center-right and far-right coalition government came to power in December 2017 and collapsed in May 2019.
Nehammer said he would like to create a commission to review the deficiencies of the intelligence services.
H. Kicklis was criticized in 2018, when under his leadership the Interior Ministry police carried out raids at the offices and homes of senior BVT officials.
Kickl later claimed that the raids were carried out in good faith, but some of them were later declared illegal by a Vienna court.
“Why didn’t they notice?”
“No one would have thought he could do something like that,” Nikolaus Rast, a lawyer who represented Feezula last year, told AFP.
The lawyer also alluded to possible deficiencies in the de-radicalization programs his former client attends.
“I wouldn’t want to blame anything specific, but if they are experts, why didn’t they notice anything?” Rast asked.
“They probably contacted him more than others and were the last to see him,” the lawyer added.
The police are now guided by the assumption that K. Fejzula was the only shooter. Initially, authorities feared there could be more attackers overall.
Officials conducted 18 raids and arrested 14 people after the attack, and Ruf said some of the people currently being questioned by police could be accomplices of the attacker.
The investigation is being carried out in several countries: two people have been arrested in Switzerland and North Macedonia, where Mr. Fejzula hails, he is cooperating with Austrian officials.
Kurz on Tuesday called on the European Union to respond to “political Islam”, saying the ideology is “a threat” to European values and freedoms.
His office said Wednesday that the chancellor had contacted French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss joint counter-terrorism initiatives.
The recent reissue of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in France has increased tensions around the world, with protests in some Muslim countries and calls for revenge from various terrorist groups.
Recently there have been several attacks in France itself: several visitors to the church were killed in a knife attack in Nice and a teacher was beheaded near Paris.
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