Vienna: Two people including one assailant were killed in central Vienna on Monday evening in which Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz expressed as a “repulsive terror attack”.Police said there was “one dead person” and several injured, including one police officer. Meanwhile, one suspect was “shot and killed by police officers,” Vienna police said.
Interior Minister Karl Nehammer told that the operation against the assailants was still underway at around 11 pm local time. Vienna Mayor Michael Ludwig told local media that 15 people had been taken to hospital, of whom seven were extremely injured. The attack had been carried out by “several suspects armed with rifles”, said police, counting that there had been “six different shooting locations”.
First gunshots were released at around 8:00 pm at the Seitenstettengasse in the city’s centrally-located first district. The shooting started just hours before Austria was to re-impose a coronavirus lockdown to try to slow the spread of Covid-19, and bars and restaurants recreated host to people enjoying a final night of relative freedom. Kurz said on Twitter that “we are experiencing difficult hours in our republic”.
“Our police will act decisively against the perpetrators of this repulsive terror attack,” he said, adding that “we will never be threatened by terrorism and we will fight this attack with all means”.Kurz said that while police were focusing on the anti-terror operation, the army would take over the security of important buildings in Vienna. Nehammer urged Vienna residents to stay in their homes and keep away from all public places or public transport.
Frequent sirens and helicopters could be heard in the city center as emergency services responded to the attack. A photographer said that large numbers of police were patrolling an area near the city’s world-famous opera house. The location of the initial shooting is close to a major synagogue. The president of Vienna’s Jewish community Oskar Deutsch said that shots had been fired “in the immediate vicinity” of the Stadttempel synagogue, but counted that it was currently unspecified whether the synagogue itself had been the target of an attack.
He said that the synagogue and office buildings at the same address had been closed at the time of the attack.” It sounded like firecrackers, then we realized it was shotting,” said one eyewitness quoted by public broadcaster ORF. A shooter had “shot wildly with an automatic weapon” before the police arrived and opened fire, the witness added. Austria had until now been limited the sort of major attacks that have hit other European countries. French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that “we French share the shock and sorrow of the Austrian people”.
“After France, it’s a friendly nation that has been attacked,” he added, referring to the killing on Thursday of three people by a knife-armed attacker in the southern city Nice and the beheading of a schoolteacher by a presumed Islamist outside Paris several days before.EU Council chief Charles Michel tweeted that the bloc “strongly condemns this cowardly act”.And Germany’s foreign ministry twittered that the reports from Austria were “horrifying and disturbing”.”We can’t give in to aversion that is aimed at dividing our societies,” the ministry added. Czech police said they had started random inspections on the border with Austria.
“Police are carrying out random checks of vehicles and passengers on border crossings with Austria as a preventive measure about the terror attack in Vienna,” Czech police tweeted. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also “strongly condemned” the shootings.” There is no room for hatred and violence in our common European home,” he said on Twitter in Italian and German.
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