Austrian authorities said Sunday that the suspect who they believe fatally stabbed a 14-year-old boy and wounded five others in the village of Villach is a Syrian refugee who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
At a press conference, Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said the 23-year-old Syrian national was arrested seven minutes after Saturday’s attack unfolded in the village of just about 60,000 people bordering Italy and Slovenia.
“This is an Islamist attack with an IS connection by an attacker who radicalized himself within a very short time via the internet online,” Karner told reporters, according to the Associated Press.
Regarding mass migration and asylum-seekers, Karner, a conservative, said it will ultimately be necessary to “carry out a mass screening without cause because this assassin was not conspicuous.”
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“There’s compassion, there’s sadness, but in these moments there’s also understandably often anger and rage,” Karner added, according to Reuters. “Anger at an Islamist attacker who randomly stabbed innocent people here in this town.”
The attack came a day after Vice President JD Vance rebuked European leaders at the Munich Security Conference over mass migration, as well as crackdowns on free speech.
As authorities revealed the alleged “Islamic terror motive,” Austria’s far-right leader Herbert Kickl, whose party won a national election four months ago, called for “a rigorous crackdown on asylum” in the wake of the attack.
Kickl wrote on X Saturday that he is “appalled by the horrific act in Villach.”
“At the same time, I am angry – angry at those politicians who have allowed stabbings, rapes, gang wars and other capital crimes to become the order of the day in Austria. This is a first-class failure of the system, for which a young man in Villach has now had to pay with his life,” Kickl said.
“From Austria to the EU – the wrong rules are in force everywhere. Nobody is allowed to challenge them, everything is declared sacrosanct,” he said, adding that his party had outlined what he viewed as necessary changes to immigration laws in its election platform.
The suspect is charged with murder and attempted murder. Austrian police said the suspect recorded himself pledging allegiance to IS, according to Reuters.
State police director Michaela Kohlweiß said authorities searched the suspect’s apartment with sniffer dogs and found IS flags on the walls.
No weapons or dangerous objects were found, she added, but police seized mobile telephones. Police were investigating whether the suspect had any accomplices.
“The current picture is that of a lone perpetrator,” Kohlweiß said, according to the AP.
Carinthia State Gov. Peter Kaiser thanked another Syrian national, a 42-year-old man working for a food delivery company, who drove toward the suspect and helped prevent the situation from getting worse.
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“This shows how closely terrorist evil but also human good can be united in one and the same nationality,” Kaiser said.
The mayor of Villach, Guenther Albel, said the attack was a “stab in the heart of the city.”
Austrian conservative party leader Christian Stocker said on X that the attacker “must be brought to justice and be punished with the full force of the law.”
“We all want to live in a safe Austria, adding that this means political measures need to be taken to avoid such acts of horror in the future,” he said.
The day before Vance visited the Munich Security Conference, an Afghan refugee on Thursday plowed a car into a crowd in the German city, injuring dozens of people, including a mother and her 2-year-old daughter, who later died.
“The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone, and of course, it’s gotten much higher since,” Vance said Friday. “It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent. Others across the world over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city. And of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place?”
“It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well,” Vance said. “An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rams a car into a crowd and shatters a community. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?”
The stabbing in Villach on Saturday marked what is believed to be the second deadly Islamic terror attack in Austria in recent years. In November 2020, a man who had previously attempted to join the Islamic State carried out a rampage in Vienna, armed with an automatic rifle and a fake explosive vest, killing four people before being fatally shot by police. Last August, Austrian authorities said they thwarted a planned attack at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna by a teenager who had also allegedly pledged allegiance to IS.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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