Vienna: At least 14 people were arrested after multiple police raids were carried out in connection to the shootings in the Austrian capital of Vienna that claimed the lives of four people earlier this week, the media reported Wednesday.
In a statement, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said the 14 people linked to the 20-year-old Islamist gunman Kujtim Fejzulai, who had been freed from jail last December, were arrested in the Vienna area, St Polten town and Linz city, the BBC reported.
Fejzulai was shot dead by the police as he fired on passers-by on Monday evening near the Seitenstettengasse synagogue at a city centre area. The gunman has been April 2019 for trying to travel to Syria to join Islamic State (IS) jihadis.
Nehammer said that although there was no indication of the involvement of a second assailant, but the possibility could not be ruled out immediately. In a video on its online propaganda channel, the IS terror group claimed responsibility for the attack.
Meanwhile, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz confirmed that the four victims were an elderly woman, an elderly man, a young man and a waitress, while 22 people were also injured, reports the BBC.
He said that the police has identified a total of six crime scenes in the area, adding that the attack driven by “hatred of our way of life, our democracy”.
Three days of national mourning began in Austria Tuesday, with flags flying at half mast. The Vienna shootings came days after a string of recent terror attacks in France.
On October 16, middle-school teacher, Samuel Paty was beheaded by an 18-year-old Muslim immigrant, Abdullakh Anzorov inside a school near Paris.
Then October 29, Brahim Aouissaoui, a 21-year-old Tunisian man, stabbed three people to death inside the Notre-Dame basilica in the city of Nice.
