Two years after the attack that cost the lives of four people in Austria, six alleged accomplices of the shooter shot by the police appeared. The prosecutor accuses them of having inspired themselves from 13-November 2015 in Paris.
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The attack had awakened an Austria who had long believed herself too small and too quiet to be targeted by an Islamist act. The evening of November 2, 2020, Kujtim Fejzulai, a 20 -year -old Austrian citizen from the Albanian minority of North Macedonia, had killed four people by randomly pulling on cafes terraces in the center of Vienna, in a scenario reminiscent of the attacks of 13-November in France. He had been quickly shot by the police, which had made it possible to avoid an even more deadly carnage.
under close surveillance, the trial of six of his alleged accomplices opened, Tuesday, October 18, at the regional criminal court of the Austrian capital. Called to present the main lines of his indictment, the prosecutor, which has remained anonymous for security reasons, as well as the jurors who will be called upon to decide the guilt of the accused at the end of the hearings scheduled until February, A Estimated that this attack had been organized by a group of Islamists who had directly inspired the French context.
tackle “a French restaurant”
“Remember the attack on” Charlie Hebdo “in 2015, and the beheading of Samuel Paty in October 2020,” she said to the jurors, assuring that the terrorist, who acted at the time Even where the first instance trial of the attack on Charlie Hebdo was held, in Paris, was initially aimed at attacking a “French restaurant” in Vienna. It was not until the last moment that the terrorist would have changed target, after having noticed that the restaurant was closed due to the entry into force of anti-Cavid confinement the same evening.
It is not certain, however, that Kujtim Fejzulai and his six alleged accomplices, aged 22 to 32, have ever set foot in France. The portrait that was made of them on Tuesday showed rather a group of men typical of the melting pot of the Viennese popular classes: almost all Austrians, the six men declared themselves unemployed, workers or students, with family origins dating back to Kosovo , in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Some would have provided arms, from Slovenia. Others are suspected of having helped choose the targets.
According to the accusation, they risk perpetuity for having participated in “a terrorist enterprise”, even if they were not present at the place of the attack at the same time as the killer who had made allegiance to the ‘Islamic State organization. A claim video showing him with a machete and two firearms had been published the day after the attack on Islamist sites. Defense lawyers have expanded to demonstrate that their customers were not aware of the project and not as radicalized as the prosecution affirms, despite the eloquent elements collected against them. “He was only receiving videos and returning them,” said a lawyer about jihadist propaganda found on his client’s phone.
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