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Europe

Vienna terror attack: Police investigating 21 potential accomplices

2020-11-14

As you read through this post, dear Reader, you’ll notice that our little Lone Wolf of Islam looks more and more connected despite his mother’s efforts.

[DW] Austrian Sherlocks have identified 21 suspected accomplices of an Islamist gunman who went on a deadly rampage in Vienna last week, officials said Friday.

On November 2, the assailant, named as dual Austrian-Macedonian national Kujtim Fejzulai,

... who ran around a few blocks of Jewish Vienna in a fake bomb vest shooting at people for nine whole minutes before the police shot him down like a rabid dog, all for love of ISIS jihad. His ISIS nom de guerre was Abu Dujana al-Albani...

rubbed out four people and injured more than 20 others in the city center before he was killed by police.

Michael Lohnegger, the police official leading the investigation, told a presser that the 20-year-old was the sole perpetrator of the shooting spree. But he added that it was not yet possible to say "to what extent accomplices provided support before the act."

A spokeswoman for the Vienna prosecutor's office, Nina Bussek, told news hounds that 21 people between the ages of 16 and 28 were under investigation, with 10 of them in jug.

"They are essentially suspected of having contributed to the crime before the terrorist attack, and of being members of a terrorist group and a criminal organization," Bussek said.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Fejzulai carried out the attack with a Serbian assault rifle, a Soviet-type handgun, a machete, as well as ammunition made in Serbia and China.

Goodness. How very international. And even if he got the cheap versions, there is some money tied up in that equipment — who fronted him the funding, since it won’t have been wired from Syria...

But Lohnegger said police were still investigating how the weapons reached Austria, and how Fejzulai managed to travel with them into the city center on the night of the attack.

I believe gym bags are considered traditional.

"What we can currently actually rule out here is that the perpetrator arrived at the scene of the crime by public transport," he said, adding that police were looking into other options, including taxis. "Whether it is also possible that he walked to the scene of the crime, I cannot say. That means I also cannot rule it out."

Austrian authorities have acknowledged there were a number of security lapses in the months before the attack. For example, they failed to properly relay information that Fejzulai had tried to buy ammunition in Slovakia in July, and that he met with known Islamists from Germany and Switzerland
...home of the Helvetians, famous for cheese, watches, yodeling, and William Tell...
that same month in Vienna.

Fejzulai was sentence to jail in April 2019 for trying to join the "Islamic State

From 3.November, but still useful background.

[TheTimes] The alumni of the mosque on the Hasnerstrasse have plotted a suicide kaboom on a German Christmas market, seduced dozens of young men into joining Islamic State

...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
and condemned Moslems outside the confines of their austere faith as kuffar, infidels.

In an attempt to reconstruct this story, The Times has spoken to several people who tried to help Fejzulai or knew the Death Eater circles in which he had moved.

Fejzulai was born in Mödling, a town on the southern fringe of Vienna. His parents were North Macedonian, his father a gardener and his mother worked in sales. In his mid-teens he began training as a telecoms engineer at a college a few minutes’ walk away from the Melit Ibrahim mosque.

Here he appears to have fallen into a radical Salafist circle whose members included the "boy bomber" Lorenz K, sentenced to nine years in prison for grooming a German 12-year-old for a suicide kaboom, and Mirsad Omerovic, a prolific Islamic State recruiter.

One expert on Islamist extremism who visited the mosque said that it should have been shut down by the state — as it was yesterday, though at least two years too late. In the summer of 2018, a few weeks after turning 18, Fejzulai tried to join an Islamist militia in Afghanistan but was turned back at the airport because he did not have a visa.

A fortnight later he flew to ~~The Sick Man of Europe~~ Turkey
...Qatar's satrapy in Asia Minor...
in an attempt to join Isis in Syria but was captured by the ~~Ottoman~~ Turkish security services. Nikolaus Rast, his lawyer at the time, remembers a "harmless young lad" who seemed incapable of violence.

"My first impression of my client was a good one," Mr Rast said. "As I got to know him he showed no signs of being radicalised. I had no way of understanding the background [to what he had done]. My client was not even able to explain to me why he had really set off on the journey to Syria."

During the trial, Fejzulai’s mother testified against him,

Ouch! But clearly he was well beyond responding to a time out or Mom’s wooden spoon...

the Austrian media reported. He was sentenced to 22 months in prison but granted conditional early release for good behaviour and referred to Derad, the deradicalisation scheme.

Fejzulai’s Derad case worker was not deceived, however. "He venerated jihadist groups and wanted to join them," Moussa al-Hassan Diaw, Derad’s director, said. "And he practised takfir [declaring other Moslems to be infidels] and began to apply takfir to himself — he had doubts about himself, which can sometimes lead people to do things to themselves, perhaps because they are in a state of sadness.

"In religious terms, he had some very naive views, for example the belief that if you make a prayer it will be fulfilled, as though by a fairy godmother. These views point towards a literalist kind of fundamentalism."

As was seen with ISIS recruits, jihadi cannon fodder tend to be abysmally ignorant about all the things they claim to care most deeply about.

Fejzulai moved into a council house, living on unemployment benefits

...the Western version of jizya...

and began seeking new friends. His handlers were under no illusions, though.

Mr Diaw said that it would have been nonsense to describe him as deradicalised. "There were positive aspects," he said. "But all that could not hide the fact that he had only changed outwardly: that his radicalisation continued and that he still clung on to the beliefs he had held before."

a.k.a. Ebu Tejma, Abu Tejma, and Ebu Tajma, Mr. Omerovic is a convicted Islamic extremist imprisoned in Austria. In July 2016, an Austrian court handed Omerovic a 20-year prison sentence after finding him guilty of recruiting young people to ISIS. Omerovic was officially charged on one count of membership in a terrorist organization, and on one count of promoting terrorist activities.

Prior to his November 2015 arrest, Omerovic had reportedly led a Vienna-based Bosnian terrorist cell through which he had recruited Europeans to join jihadist groups abroad. Omerovic was allegedly responsible for radicalizing Austrian teens Samra Kesinovic, then 17, and Sabina Selimovic, then 15, who joined ISIS in April 2014, becoming worldwide poster girls for the group. In November 2015, news reports emerged that Kesinovic had been beaten to death by ISIS after trying to escape from the group’s stronghold in Raqqa, Syria.

These two high-profile recruits were among the more than 160 Europeans believed to have joined ISIS after being radicalized by Omerovic, who preached radicalizing messages in local mosques, as well as through his YouTube videos.

Before his arrest, Omerovic was believed to maintain a direct line of communication with ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Omerovic was reportedly is believed to have been deeply connected to other jihadist operations in Europe. According to one Austrian newspaper, there is was “scarcely a single recruit in Europe for jihad in which [Omerovic] and his group were not involved.”

Posted by:trailing wife

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