Vienna shooting: Raids in Germany on gunman's contacts

German police have searched the homes of four men over suspected links with a militant Islamist gunman who shot dead four people in central Vienna.

Police say the men are not considered suspects but they did have contact with the attacker and two met him in person.

A number of suspects are still being held in Austria, but officials are following up leads in Switzerland too.

The gunman went on the rampage in Vienna on Monday night, opening fire in six places in the centre.

Two women and two men were killed and 23 were wounded. Police shot the gunman dead and found that he had both Austrian and Macedonian citizenship.

Austrian authorities are trying to track down the 20-year-old killer's contacts.

'Monitored around the clock'

"We are dealing with a violent criminal who was clearly intensely active in the political Islamist network, a sympathiser who took on their ideology," Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said on Thursday.

Mr Nehammer said Austrian authorities had had "intensive" co-operation with the FBI in the US and that two of the leads pointed to Switzerland and another unnamed country.

Friday's raids in Kassel, Osnabrück and the Pinneberg area near Hamburg indicated that investigators were also looking into links in Germany.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has already highlighted a German connection involving people who are "monitored around the clock".

The four men whose homes were searched were aged 19 to 25 and part of the "Islamist scene", reports said. Two of the four are thought to have met the attacker in Vienna in July, German officials say.

Both men met him several times and one of them stayed at his home, German news agency DPA reported. Another of the men had stayed with the gunman's family in Vienna and tried unsuccessfully to travel to Syria, it is alleged.

The Vienna gunman travelled to Turkey in 2018 in an attempt to join Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria but was caught and sent back to Austria. IS has claimed via its propaganda outlet that it was behind the Vienna attack.

Meanwhile, Austrian officials are seeking pre-trial detention for eight of the 16 men they say have been arrested since the Vienna shooting.

Was attack prompted by planned Vienna raids?

Austria's interior minister has refused to comment on reports suggesting that security forces had been hours away from conducting a major anti-terror operation when the shooting began.

Operation "Ramses" was due to start at 03:00 on Tuesday, with raids on the homes of people known to the gunman, the reports say. But information about the searches was reportedly passed on by an interpreter.

Nehammer has already admitted shortcomings in Austria's handling of the gunman, identified as Kujtim Fejzulai.

He was jailed for 22 months in April 2019 for trying to travel to Syria, but released early, and the interior minister has claimed Fejzulai "perfectly fooled" a deradicalisation programme, Derad, into letting him out. The organisation has rejected the accusation.

He did admit "some things went wrong", after it emerged that authorities in Slovakia had told their Austrian colleagues that the suspect had tried to buy ammunition there in July.

The domestic intelligence agency, BVT, has come under particular pressure for its handling of the gunman.

However, Vienna police chief Gerhard Pürstl said there had been difficulties in confirming the suspect's identity with Slovak authorities and they could not have acted before doing so.

"Nobody should be tempted to read a detective novel from back to front," he told reporters.

(Source: BBC)