Austria is facing “high-risk threats” of Islamist terrorism, according to the head of the Central European country’s domestic intelligence agency, who spoke after yet another terrorist attack, this time targeting a railway station, was thwarted.
Austrian authorities announced on Wednesday, February 19th, that they had arrested a 14-year-old boy with Turkish roots last week. He was planning to carry out an attack on one of Vienna’s largest train stations, the Westbahnhof.
The boy had been radicalised on the internet and had shared posts and videos with Islamic extremist content—including an excerpt from the 2015 Islamist terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo—on several TikTok profiles.
During a search of his home in Vienna, investigators found numerous Islamist extremist books as well as sketches of attacks with knives and machetes at a station and against police officers, and drawings of fighters with the Islamic State (ISIS) flag. They also found handwritten instructions for making explosive material to serve as a detonator for a bomb.
The announcement comes only days after a terrorist attack on Saturday: a 23-year-old Syrian man, who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, randomly selected and stabbed passers-by in the southern town of Villach, killing a 14-year-old boy and wounding five others.
Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, the head of the domestic intelligence agency, warned that more and more young people are being radicalised very quickly on TikTok through terrorist groups such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Hamas.
He added that the number of people in Austria who pose a “high-risk threat” has risen from a double-digit to a “low three-digit” figure, and that a total of 650 Islamists are under observation throughout Austria.
The last terrorist attack happened four years ago, when a convicted ISIS sympathiser went on a shooting rampage in downtown Vienna, killing four people.
But there have been many thwarted attacks, which clearly signal that the danger is far from over.
A 19-year-old man with North Macedonian roots planned a suicide attack at a Taylor Swift concert in August in Vienna. A month later, an Austrian man of Bosnian extraction was shot dead by police before he was able to attack the Israeli consulate in Munich, Germany.
In 2023, attacks were thwarted on the St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, the central train station, the Hauptbahnhof, and the Vienna Pride Parade.
The centre-right People’s Party (ÖVP), which is holding talks with the Social Democrats to form another grand coalition, has proposed the mass surveillance of online messaging services to solve the problem of radicalisation.
The right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ), on the other hand, says the most recently thwarted attack is “the direct result of the failed integration policy and the open borders that open the door to radical Islamists.” Dominik Nepp of the FPÖ demanded the immediate closure of “radical Islamist mosques and associations,” and the immediate deportation of those who pose a threat.
