Raids on Islamists in Germany after the Vienna Terrorist Attack
The assassin was apparently not only well-connected to Switzerland, but also had connections to Germany. In the meantime, the German police have carried out raids on several residential and commercial premises of suspected Islamists.
The homes and offices of several suspected Islamists in Germany were searched. / Picture: © Wikimedia Commons / No machine-readable author provided. Klaus with K assumed (based on copyright claims). [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
Due to the Islamist-motivated terrorist attack in Vienna on Monday evening, the German federal prosecutor's office is conducting investigations.
Four people were killed and more than 20 were injured, some of them seriously, in the attack in downtown Vienna. The assassin himself had been shot by the police.
According to information from the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany (BKA Bundeskriminalamt), the homes and offices of several suspected Islamists in Germany were searched.
Searches were carried out at the contact persons of the 20-year-old assassin in the Islamist scene in Germany.
The 20-year-old Kujtim F. with Austrian and North Macedonian citizenship had tried to join the Islamic state in 2018. However, the attempt had failed. He was arrested in Turkey and sentenced after his extradition to Austria. According to the German Federal Prosecutor's Office, there are altogether four non-suspects in Osnabrück, Pinneberg and Kassel.
The assassin is said to have met with two of them in Vienna in July 2020, and there was contact with a third person via the Internet. There was no direct contact with the fourth person, only indirect contact via the Internet.
The German Federal Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, had already declared in the Bundestag that the assassin from Vienna had connections to potential assassins in Germany.
The German Federal Prosecutor's Office has so far assumed that the contact persons in the Islamist scene in Germany were not involved in the preparation of the attack.
"Nobody was arrested, it was only a matter of securing possible evidence", the Federal Prosecutor's Office announced according to ARD.
Anschlagsgeschehen in Wien
— Bundeskriminalamt (@bka) November 6, 2020
BKA-Kräfte durchsuchen seit heute Morgen im Auftrag des @GBA_b_BGH & mit Unterstützung von Polizeikräften aus NI, HE, SH sowie der BPol (GSG9) die Wohn-& Geschäftsräume von 4 nicht tatverdächtigen Personen in Osnabrück, Kassel sowie im Kreis Pinneberg. pic.twitter.com/KI4RTKWAaV