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Police officers in the city center of Vienna
Photo: Georges Schneider / dpa
When dead and injured people were reported in downtown Vienna on Monday evening, it only looked as if a terrorist squad had marched through the streets.
Shots rang out in several places within a few minutes: at Morzinplatz, at Fleischmarkt, at Franz-Josephs-Kai, near the synagogue in Seitenstettengasse.
Several assassins were feared, shooting indiscriminately from assault rifles at local visitors and passers-by, as they did five years ago in Paris.
One day later it became increasingly clear: It was probably only one man who fired the shots in Vienna's nightlife district, killed four people and injured 22 others: Kujtim F., 20, born in Mödling near Vienna, owner of an Austrian and a Macedonian Passport.
Armed with a Kalashnikov, a pistol and a machete, he went to work.
Until a policeman stopped him with a fatal bullet.
He wore an explosives belt on his body, but it turned out to be a dummy.
It appears that the attacker planned his own death.
Islamist terrorism is back
It is still open whether there were backers or helpers.
In the evening, the terrorist militia "Islamic State" (IS) claimed the attack for itself and described the assassin as a "soldier of the caliphate".
An agency close to IS posted a selfie that apparently shows him with his weapons.
Like the alleged assassin from Dresden, who stabbed a gay couple on October 4 and killed a man, Kujtim F. had served a youth sentence for terrorist offenses.
He got out of prison prematurely, the authorities apparently did not trust him to carry out an attack - a fatal misjudgment.
Dresden, Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, Nice, now Vienna: Islamist terrorism is back in Europe.
After the fall of IS in Syria and Iraq, it initially looked as if this danger had been contained.
Security experts believed that larger, coordinated attacks had become less likely.
But the ideology of the Islamists, as the actions of the past few weeks show, is not so easy to get out of the minds of their followers.
And deluded young men can also commit murderous acts without having been trained to kill by a terrorist group.
In a judgment of the Vienna Regional Court from April 2019, one can read how Kujtim F. radicalized himself.
He and a school friend who was two years older visited fundamentalist mosques in Vienna and came across Salafist preachers.
They consumed even harsher propaganda on the Internet.
This did not go unnoticed by the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Fight against Terrorism: The secret service found that the friends began at the beginning of 2018 to "deal intensively with the ideas and ideologies of IS", as the judgment says.
They came into contact with ISIS members in Syria and Iraq through the messenger service Telegram.
In July 2018, Kujtim F. sent a four-minute IS propaganda video via his Telegram account with gunfire, chants and the constantly repeated slogan: "It is time for the holy war for God. Let me fight the tyrants and the dishonorable, Unbelievers, the real enemy ".
A month later, he and his buddy decided to join the offshoot of the IS terrorist militia in Afghanistan.
But they did not have the necessary visa for the flight from Vienna to Kabul.
The two then canceled their tickets.
In the "Safehouse" of the terrorist militia
A week later, Kujtim F. tried to get to IS alone, this time via Syria.
On the morning of September 1, 2018, he boarded a Turkish Airlines plane to Istanbul.
From there he traveled to Hatay in the Turkish-Syrian border area.
Here he waited in a hotel until a contact picked him up and took him to a "safe house" of the terrorist organization.
There, according to the judgment, Kujtim F. met two Germans and a Belgian who were apparently also waiting to be smuggled into Syria.
The action was delayed.
Kujtim F. was arrested by the Turkish authorities and extradited to Austria.
In April 2019, the Vienna Regional Court sentenced him to 22 months' imprisonment for membership in the terrorist organization IS.
In discussions with the youth court assistance service, Kujtim F. showed himself to be "open-minded and accessible", according to the judgment, and was "quite ready to reflect".
He was released from prison in December.
The repentance was evidently only an act.
Austria's Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said that the perpetrator had only faked successful participation in a de-radicalization program of the judiciary in order to be released earlier.
Kujtim F. "tricked the program brutally, perfidiously," said the minister.
Even after his release, he admitted that he had "made special efforts" with his probation officers.
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