[imagesource: Ronald Zak / AP]

Four people – an elderly man, an elderly woman, a young man in the area, and a waitress – are confirmed dead and 22 others injured following a terror attack in Vienna on Monday night.

Seven of the 22 people who were injured are in critical condition, including a police officer who was shot in the back.

A suspect, a 20-year-old dual Austrian and North Macedonian citizen, named Kujtim Fejzulai, armed with an automatic rifle, a handgun and a machete, was also killed by officers at the scene.

He was killed nine minutes after opening fire on Vienna’s first district, outside its main synagogue, at 8PM.

According to The Guardian, Fejzulai “deceived” his mentors in a deradicalisation programme to feign a renunciation of jihadism, Austria’s interior minister, Karl Nehammer, has said.

Prior to this, he had been sentenced to 22 months in a detention centre for trying to join the Islamic State but had been released from prison early.

The attacker, born in Mödling, south of Vienna, developed a strong interest in political Islam as a teenager and eventually hatched plans to join Isis in Syria. He was deported from Turkey to Austria after a failed attempt in September 2018 to cross the border into Syria and was sentenced to 22 months in prison on 25 April 2019.

The deradicalisation programme that he was enrolled in was a condition of his parole.

The young man had deliberately created the impression that he was eager to reintegrate into Austrian society in his meetings with the deradicalisation programme, Nehammer said, “all while being focused on destroying the system”.

Image: Reuters

…“Fact is: the terrorist managed to deceive the judiciary’s deradicalisation programme … We need to evaluate and optimise the system on the side of the judiciary.”

The programme is facilitated by 13 mentors who work with individuals who are either suspected of having become radicalised, or have already been sentenced for an association with terror groups.

The programme’s director, Moussa Al-Hassan Diaw, said that they released reports on Fejzulai, which seemed to be positive, but that the outcome of his deradicalisation would only have been confirmed once he had completed his mandatory participation.

Fourteen people associated with the assailant have been detained for questioning in searches on 18 properties in and near Vienna.

Police in Switzerland arrested two men in the city of Winterthur about 10km from Zurich, whom they say were “obviously friends” with Fejzulai.

“The two men were arrested on Tuesday afternoon in coordination with the Austrian authorities,” Zurich cantonal police said.

“The extent to which there was a connection between the two arrested persons and the alleged assassin is currently the subject of ongoing clarifications and investigations which are being carried out by the responsible authorities.”

Per The Washington Post, the Islamic State released a statement via the group’s Amaq News Agency on Tuesday evening, calling Fejzulai a “soldier of the caliphate”.

It named him by the nom de guerre Abu Dujana al-Albani. Earlier, Islamist militant forums circulated an image they claimed to be of Fejzulai, said Rajan Basra, a researcher at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London.

The picture showed a bearded man holding a large knife, a pistol and a Kalashnikov-style rifle. It was accompanied by a pledge to Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi.

Sky News also reports that prior to the attack, Fejzulai had posted a photo on his Instagram account that showed him with two weapons.

In the initial chaos, police reported that there were multiple attackers, but security officials backpedalled on Tuesday, saying that the videos examined so far – apparently tens of thousands submitted by the public – indicated a single shooter.

[sources:guardian&washingtonpost&skynews]