- Joined
- Mar 11, 2013
- Messages
- 13,228
- Points
- 113
Four people were killed and more than a dozen injured, several of them critically, in Monday’s attack in the Austrian capital. The 20-year-old perpetrator was shot and killed by police. Authorities have classified the attack as a terrorist incident motivated by Islamist extremism.
All those detained in connection with Monday’s terror attack in the centre of Vienna have a migrant background, and some are foreign nationals, Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer has said.
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Nehammer also indicated that the arrested people were between the ages of 18 and 28, and are under investigation for suspected involvement in a terrorist organisation. Police earlier reported that 14 people had been detained in Austria after raids at 18 separate locations.
Nehammer also reported that Slovak officials had informed their Austrian neighbours of ammunition possibly being bought by the terror suspect inside Slovakia, but “something went wrong” and that an “apparent miscommunication” took place between Austrian agencies after the intelligence was received.The interior minister added that more than a terabyte of video evidence of the attacks from eyewitnesses confirmed the lone attacker theory to be true, and showed the brutality and cruelty with which they took place.
The minister blamed his predecessor Herbert Kickl for weakening the capabilities of Austria’s domestic intelligence service and causing it “lasting damage”.“In the past few hours information has come to light that some time before the terror attack, Slovakian intelligence informed BVT [Austrian intelligence] about the attacker. The information was that he wanted to get ammunition,” Nehammer said.
Nehammer also repeated that the attacker had fooled Austria’s deradicalisation programme “perfectly”, leading to his early release from custody on terrorism-related charges late last year….