The prime suspect in bomb plot to kill Taylor Swift fans at a concert in Vienna “today or tomorrow” has been revealed, and has made a full confession to police, the Austrian state says.
Two migrant-heritage teenagers are in custody in Austria after a series of Taylor Swift concerts at a Vienna city stadium were cancelled at the last moment, having been meant to have gone ahead tonight and the next two nights. Some 60,000 ticket holders and up to 200,000 fans in total were expected to attend over the three nights, given the large numbers expected to arrive without a ticket but in hope of getting one.
It is these groups of non-ticket holders who were expected to congregate outside the Happel stadium in Vienna that were to be the targets of the alleged attack, it is stated. “Functional explosives” and machetes were found when officers raided properties, it is stated.
19-year-old ‘Beran A.’ [pictured top, right], his full identity strictly protected in line with Austrian law on anonymity before conviction, was revealed at a government press conference on Thursday. He was born in Ternitz, Austria but is of Macedonian heritage. Beran was said to have recently quit his job stating he had “big plans”, and recently adopted a new name of “Mo” — Mohammed — while changing his appearance to take on a more stereotypically Islamist mien.
A screen displays a photo of a man arrested in connection with an Islamist attack plot that caused the cancellation of the Vienna leg of a tour by American mega-star Taylor Swift, on the sidelines of a press conference on August 8, 2024 at the Foreign Ministy in Vienna, Austria. A 19-year-old IS sympathiser was planning a suicide attack at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna designed to kill many people, the intelligence agency said. (Photo by ROLAND SCHLAGER / APA / AFP) / Austria OUT (Photo by ROLAND SCHLAGER/APA/AFP via Getty Images)
Beran A. has made a “full confession”, Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said. The politician said the security situation “was serious… is serious” but nevertheless stated “Our state security is working!”, reports the nation’s best-selling newspaper Kronen Zeitung.
Also arrested was an as-of-yet unnamed 17-year-old of Turkish-Croatian heritage, allegedly a co-conspirator, who was employed at the Happel stadium where the attack was said to be planned to take place. He has not made a confession. A report in the Kurier newspaper states the company employing the 17-year-old was contracted to provide “cleaning and security” services to the stadium, although what role he performed was not revealed.
Police have also questioned a 15-year-old, but there is no definite indication of involvement yet.
Head of the Austrian secret service Omar Haijawi-Pirchner said of the plan of the confessed would-be Islamist terrorist: “His goal was to kill himself and a large crowd of people today or tomorrow”. Beran A. “has clearly been radicalized and thinks it is right to kill ‘infidels”, Haijawi-Pirchner stated.
The spy chief said it was certain the attack was going to use explosives and bladed weapons, and that it was possible it could have been started by driving a vehicle into crowds first, like many other terror attacks in Europe in the past decade, but that has yet to be conclusively proven. Nevertheless, the press conference stated when officers raided properties associated with the suspects, “functional explosives” and machetes were discovered, as well as hydrogen peroxide, knives, anabolic steroids, blank-firing ammunition, and counterfeit money.
Austria’s Heute newspaper further states a police-style blue light and siren was found during searches, and asserts Beran A. had intended to impersonate a police officer during party of the attack, possibly to give cover to his vehicle driving at high speed before ploughing into crowds. They state: “The arrested man planned to drive his car into the crowd. He then wanted to get out and kill more people with stabbing weapons. As a fatal climax, he was to detonate a homemade bomb.”
The explosives were found to be too fragile to remove from the property and so were destroyed on-site. The instability and the presence of hydrogen peroxide at the scene suggest the explosive Beran A. is alleged to have been able to make with instructions downloaded from the internet are Islamic State-favourite the ‘mother of satan’, Triacetone-Triperoxide (‘TATP’).
The explosive is favoured by terrorists because the ingredients are legally available to buy, but its instability means it can explode inadvertently with a handling error. This was a factor with a recent attempted terror attack in France, allegedly by a pro-Russian terrorist, who accidentally blew himself up in a hotel room at Paris’s main airport.
While the investigation is in its early days, the Vienna Taylor Swift terror plot has at least a passing resemblance to the successfully executed Ariana Grande concert attack at the Manchester Arena concert venue in Manchester, England, in 2017. 22 people were killed when a Islamist extremist detonated a 66-pound TATP device in a hall full of children, young people, and their parents.