Austria’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer admitted on Friday that the bomber who killed four people in Vienna on Monday had not been placed under surveillance before, despite having contacted people watched by the Vienna National Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Combating Terrorism (LVT).
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These are the contacts of the future murderer in July with people in Austria, who were followed by the LVT on behalf of analogous German services. No appropriate steps were taken then, committing “obvious and, from our point of view, impossible to tolerate mistakes,” the minister said, adding that “immediate personal consequences” were drawn from it. The head of the Viennese LVT, Erich Zwettler, was dismissed at his own request. When asked if he felt politically responsible for these omissions, Nehammer replied that he saw his responsibility in acting when he was aware of the irregularities. According to the head of the Viennese police, Gerhard Puerstl, taking into account the information he had about the future bomber – including his attempt to buy weapons in Slovakia – “could lead to a different assessment of the threat.”
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Attack in ViennaEPA / CHRISTIAN BRUNA
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Austrian Minister for Women’s Affairs and Integration Susanne Raab announced the closure of two Viennese mosques which the bomber attended and where his radicalization was progressing.
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Candles at the shooting site in ViennaPAP / EPA / FLORIAN WIESER
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The attack in Vienna
The detailed report on the course of the attack presented by the police on Friday shows that the perpetrator shot successively from several places located not more than 75 meters from a specific point in the Bermuda Triangle cafe at Schwedenplatz. Besides the Kalashnikov, he also used a pistol.
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The people killed by him were a 24-year-old German student working as a waitress, a 44-year-old Austrian who died in hospital, and two Austrians aged 21 and 39. The terrorist died from a police bullet that pierced his chest below the left shoulder blade
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photo-source">Main photo source: PAP / EPA / FELIX HUBER
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