VILLACH, Austria—The Syrian asylum seeker suspected of carrying out a deadly stabbing rampage in the Austrian town of Villach had sworn allegiance to the ISIS terrorist group and was radicalized online, authorities said on Feb. 16.
A 14-year-old boy was killed in the afternoon attack on Feb. 15 in the center of Villach, and five other people were wounded, three of them requiring intensive care, police said.
Interior Minister Gerhard Karner told a news conference in Villach that the 23-year-old Syrian man, who was arrested seven minutes after the first call to the police, had been rapidly radicalized on the internet and that the ISIS flag had been found in his apartment.
Karner, a conservative, told reporters there was sadness and sympathy for the victims, then added:
“But in these moments there’s also understandably often anger and rage. Anger at an Islamist attacker who randomly stabbed innocent people here in this town.”
Karner also said officials should have greater powers to screen asylum seekers and there would have to be “mass checks without cause in many areas” since the suspect had not attracted the authorities’ attention.
Police said the man, who is being charged with murder and attempted murder, had recorded himself swearing an oath of allegiance to ISIS.
More harm would have been done had it not been for another Syrian, a food delivery driver, who saw the attacker and drove into him with his vehicle to stop him, authorities said.
ISIS has not claimed responsibility for the attack so far. However, the media section of ISIS’s Afghan branch, ISIS-K, recently circulated a post by ISIS calling for lone wolf attacks in America and Europe following a New Year attack in New Orleans, according to SITE Intelligence.
The bloodshed in Villach followed the thwarting of a plot in August 2024 to carry out a suicide attack at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna that was planned by a teenager who had also sworn loyalty to ISIS.
Some residents of Villach, a town of about 65,000 people on the River Drava, said they refused to be intimidated by the threat of terrorism. Others expressed shock.
“Until now I felt secure, but it’s another feeling now,” a local man, who gave the name Siegfried, said. “I’m not so sure as before.”
The Feb. 15 rampage came just days after an attack on Feb. 13 in neighboring Germany by an Afghan national who drove his car into a crowd in Munich, injuring dozens of people, two of whom later died.
