A man who opened fire in central Vienna on Monday night while armed with an automatic rifle, a pistol and a machete and wearing a fake explosive device was a 20-year-old Austrian citizen who had sought to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said in a news briefing on Tuesday.
The rampage left four dead and 22 others wounded in the heart of the Austrian capital before the gunman was killed by the police nine minutes after the assault began, Mr. Nehammer said, adding that the evidence gathered so far showed no indication that others were involved. The attacker, an Austrian who also has citizenship from North Macedonia, was identified as Kujtim Fejzulai by officials and his former lawyer, Nikolaus Rast.
Barely 24 hours after the assault, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, calling the shooter a “soldier of the caliphate” who had used an automatic weapon, pistol and knife to kill or wound “close to 30 Crusaders,” according to a statement translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremist messaging.
It was not clear from the Islamic State’s declaration whether it had helped plan the attack or if others were involved. But ISIS has used similar language before in asserting responsibility for assaults by individuals acting on their own.
Swiss authorities said two men, aged 18 and 24, had been detained in Switzerland on Tuesday on suspicion of a connection to the attacker in Vienna.
Mr. Nehammer said that the suspect in Vienna had been arrested once before after trying to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State. The man was sentenced to 22 months in prison for that attempt but was released early, raising questions about how someone on the radar of the authorities had managed to carry out such an attack.
Austrians vowed that the attacker would not divide their society or destroy their democracy. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria said in an address to the nation on Tuesday morning that the shooting was “definitely an Islamist terrorist attack,” which he called “an attack out of hatred, hatred for our basic values.”
“We often see ourselves as a blessed island where violence and terror is only known from abroad,” he said. “But the sad truth is: Even if we live in a generally safe country, we don’t live in a safe world.”
The Austrian government announced a three-day period of official mourning, beginning on Tuesday, in which flags on public buildings will be lowered to half-staff. A minute’s silence was held at noon.
On Tuesday morning, Harald Sörös, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said that a second woman had died of her injuries, bringing the number of victims to four. Twenty-two people were wounded, Mr. Nehammer later confirmed.
Monday’s violence comes after recent terror attacks in France — including the beheading of a teacher and a knife attack at a church — that have both been linked to Islamist extremists. But Mr. Kurz warned against making assumptions about the Muslim community.
“This is no fight between Christians and Muslims, or between Austrians and migrants,” he said. “This is a fight between civilization and barbarism.”
Ümit Vural, president of the Islamic Faith Community in Austria, condemned the “cowardly, revolting attack,” calling it “an attack on our Vienna” and “an attack on all of us.”
“Our democracy, our freedom and liberal order is stronger than violence and terror,” he said.
An ecumenical memorial service for the victims was held Tuesday evening in St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
Table Of Contents
What do we know about the gunman who was killed, and the others arrested?
The attacker was known to the authorities and had previously been convicted of attempted jihad and attempted membership in a terror organization, after he tried — and failed — to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State group, Mr. Nehammer, the Austrian interior minister, said on Tuesday.
He was sentenced to 22 months in prison but only served a few, Mr. Nehammer said. Evidence found in the suspect’s home, including a stockpile of munitions, indicated that he had lived a split life — presenting himself to the world as fully integrated into society, while clearly embracing radicalism in private, the minister said.
“There were no warning signs about his radicalization,” Mr. Nehammer added, vowing to review the justice system to try to ensure that a similar situation would not happen again.
Before the attack, the man posted a photograph of himself to social media, wielding a machete and a rifle with a message that “clearly indicated his sympathy for I.S.,” the minister said, using an abbreviation for the Islamic State.
Nikolaus Rast, who represented the man when he was on trial in 2018 for attempting to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State, said there had been no indication he was dangerous. His client had planned to travel to Syria to join the extremist group with a friend, but he only got as far as Turkey and was soon arrested and taken back to Austria, Mr. Rast said.
There had been no sign that his parents shared his extremist views, and the man’s mother had been the one to alert the authorities when her son first went missing at that time, Mr. Rast added.
Mr. Rast said that his client’s remorse after returning to Austria seemed genuine and that his behavior in prison was such that he was released after only about a year of his 22-month sentence. The man took part in a special de-radicalization program, the lawyer added.
“He gave the impression of a young man who was searching for who he was,” Mr. Rast said. “At no point did I have the impression that he was dangerous.”
At least 14 people who are linked to the suspect in Austria have been detained and are being questioned, and 18 locations are being searched, Mr. Nehammer said in the afternoon briefing. Several raids were carried out, mostly in Vienna, but also in St. Pölten, an hour west of the city, and in Linz, about 115 miles west of the capital.
The view from Vienna, a bustling capital gone quiet.
The cobbled streets of the center of Vienna, normally full of tourists, government employees and other citizens, was largely empty on Tuesday, save for hundreds of heavily armed police officers. School attendance was optional and residents were encouraged to stay home.
Church bells rang out at noon, as the city paused for a moment to honor the victims. Among them, Austria’s largest church bell — the “Pummerin,” which hangs in the northern tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral and is only used for special events — rang out.
The attack on Monday came hours before the country entered a lockdown to combat the coronavirus, with many people having gathered outdoors in Vienna before it came into force. Hundreds of others were trapped in the city’s famed opera house and the national theater, both of which were evacuated by the police hours after the curtains had fallen.
“You could feel a lot of people wanted to get out one more time before lockdown starts,” said Ameli Pietsch, 23, who was in the area an hour before the attack. “It was a mild evening, and lots of people were outside.”
All of that changed in a moment. People scrambled from the streets to shelter in restaurants, and all trams and subways in the city’s center were halted as the police urged residents to shelter in place.
The sound of sirens and helicopters filled the night air as people struggled to absorb what was happening.
Said Farnaz Alavi, 34, a human resources consultant in Vienna, said, “We are in shock.”
Mr. Kurz said in his speech Tuesday morning that the gunman had killed four people at close range — an older man, an older woman, a younger man passing by and a waitress working in a restaurant.
But he also urged citizens to remember that “our enemy is never all those belonging to a religion, our enemy is never all the people that come from a particular country” but rather “our enemy is extremists and terrorists.”
“They do not belong in our society,” he added.
Mr. Nehammer and police said investigators were still reconstructing the events of Monday night, trying to determine how just one gunman, as they now believe, could have been responsible for the gunshots recorded at all six locations.
The first emergency calls reached police at 8 p.m. on Monday night from the Seitenstettengasse, where the city’s main synagogue sits surrounded by bars, an area known locally as the “Bermuda Triangle.” There, the gunman opened fire on a young man in the street.
Around the corner, a woman waiting tables at a bar in the Ruprechtsplatz, named for the city’s oldest church, was shot and killed. At 8:09 p.m. police fatally shot the gunman in the same square.
Police said that another victim was found on the Fleischmarkt — several minutes’ walk from the Ruprechtsplatz — and another on a nearby open square beside the canal that runs through the city, the Franz-Josefs-Kai. A 28-year-old police officer was also shot there, but a group of young men dragged him to safety and are credited with saving his life.
The city has found itself in the cross hairs before.
Austria — and Vienna in particular — has been a target over the years for terrorist attacks, often with deadly outcomes. Religious and political tensions, sometimes with no clear connection to Austria, have led to sporadic violence.
In 1975, a meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in the city was stormed by six men with submachine guns. They killed three people and took at least 60 hostages.
A group that claimed responsibility cast the attack as “an act of political contestation and information” aimed at “the alliance between American imperialism and the capitulating reactionary forces in the Arab homeland.”
In 1981, Heinz Nittel, a leader of the Austrian Socialist party and head of the Austria-Israel Friendship Society, was assassinated outside his home by an assailant associated with a militant Palestinian group.
Two people were killed in 1981 when terrorists attacked a synagogue with grenades and firearms. Just after Christmas in 1985, panic engulfed the Vienna airport when three gunmen stormed the check-in lounge and opened fire with submachine guns, killing three and wounding dozens.
Witnesses at the time said the attack began as an El Al Israel Airlines flight was boarding. The attack appeared to be coordinated with another El Al check-in 10 minutes earlier in Rome.
From 1993 to 1997, a series of mail bombs and other explosive devices, including one that wounded the mayor of Vienna, stoked fears of rising neo-Nazi terrorism in the country. The man who was convicted in the attacks said that his goal had been to create a reunification of German-speaking areas.
Melissa Eddy, Christopher F. Schuetze and Katrin Bennhold reported from Berlin, and Megan Specia from London. Reporting was contributed by Anton Troianovski from Moscow; Aurelien Breeden from Paris; Livia Albeck-Ripka from Darwin, Australia; Joe Ritchie from Hong Kong; and Christoph Koettl, Farnaz Fassihi and Emmett Lindner from New York.