The Austrian government has announced that the mastermind behind a bomb plot to kill Taylor Swift fans at a concert in Vienna “today or tomorrow” has been identified and given a full confession to police.
Two migrant teenagers have been detained in Austria after Taylor Swift concerts planned for tonight and the next two nights at a stadium in Vienna were cancelled at the last minute. Around 60,000 ticket holders and up to 200,000 fans were expected to attend over the three nights, with many expected to turn up without tickets hoping to get one.
A group of ticketless people expected to gather outside Vienna’s Happelstadion were allegedly meant to be the target of the attack. When police searched the house they allegedly found “functional explosives” and a machete.
19-year-old “Veran A.” [pictured top, right]In accordance with Austria’s pre-conviction anonymity laws, his full identity was revealed at a government press conference on Thursday. He was born in Telnitz, Austria, but is of Macedonian descent. Beran recently quit his job, saying he had “big plans,” and is said to have recently adopted a new name, “Mo,” or Mohammed, and changed his appearance to a more stereotypically Muslim appearance.
On the sidelines of a press conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, Austria, on August 8, 2024, a screen showed a photo of a man arrested in connection with an Islamic extremist attack plot that led to the cancellation of American megastar Taylor Swift’s Vienna concert. Intelligence sources said a 19-year-old ISIS supporter was planning a suicide bomb attack aimed at causing multiple deaths at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. (Photo by Roland Schlager/APA/AFP)/OUT, Austria (Photo by Roland Schlager/APA/AFP/via Getty Images)
Austria’s Interior Minister Gerhard Kerner said Veran A. had made a “full confession”. He said the security situation was “grave… and still is grave”, but added that “our security is functioning!” Reports The best-selling newspaper in the country Kronen Zeitung.
Also arrested was an alleged co-conspirator, an unnamed 17-year-old Turkish-Croatian boy who worked at Happel Stadium where the attack was allegedly planned. He has not confessed. Report of Creation The paper said the company employing the 17-year-old was contracted to provide “cleaning and security” services to the stadium, but did not say what role the boy played.
Police are also questioning a 15-year-old boy but there is no clear evidence yet of his involvement.
“His aim was to kill himself and many others today or tomorrow,” Austria’s intelligence chief, Omar Hajjawi-Pirchner, said of the self-confessed Islamist terrorist’s plans. “Veran A. has clearly been radicalized and believes it is right to kill ‘infidels,'” Hajjawi-Pirchner said.
The intelligence chief said the attack certainly planned to use explosives or knives, and that it could have been launched by driving a car into a crowd, as in many other terrorist attacks in Europe over the past decade, but that this had not yet been conclusively proven. But the press conference said that police had found “working explosives,” as well as machetes, hydrogen peroxide, knives, anabolic steroids, blank artillery shells and counterfeit currency when they searched property linked to the suspects.
Austrian Heute newspaper moreover Police-style blue lights and sirens were found during the search and it is alleged that Veran A was impersonating a police officer during the attack, possibly attempting to conceal his car as it was travelling at high speed before driving into the crowd. They said: “The arrested man had planned to drive his car into the crowd, then get out of his car and attempt to kill more people with a stabbing weapon, and as a deadly climax he intended to detonate a homemade bomb.”
The explosives were destroyed at the scene as they proved too fragile to be removed from the building. The instability of the explosives and the presence of hydrogen peroxide at the scene suggest that the explosive, which Veran A. allegedly made using instructions downloaded from the internet, is the “Mother of Satan”, a variant of the Islamic State’s explosives. Triacetone-triperoxide (“TATP”).
The explosives are popular with terrorists because the ingredients can be purchased legally, but they are unstable and can detonate accidentally if mishandled — a factor in the recent attempted terror attack in France, blamed on a pro-Russian terrorist who accidentally blew himself up in a hotel room at Paris’ main airport.
Though the investigation is still in its early stages, the plot to attack Taylor Swift in Vienna bears at least some similarities to the 2017 attack on an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena concert venue in Manchester, England, where an Islamic extremist detonated a 66-pound TATP device in an auditorium filled with children, teens, and their parents, killing 22 people.
