The 20-year-old Kujtim Fejzulai, dressed in a black shirt and cap, with an automatic rifle, a handgun and a machete in hand looked into the camera for the last photo he posted of himself on Instagram before setting off on a killing spree in Vienna. Austrian Chancellor, Sebestian Kurz had described the shootout as a dreadful terror attack.

On the day of the shootout, Fejzulai killed four people and injured 22 in what was the deadliest attack in Austria’s capital for decades, moving through Vienna’s inner city and shooting at passers-by for nine minutes from about 8 p.m., until he was shot dead by police. Kujtim Fejzulai was an Austrian-North Macedonian dual national, who wanted to travel to Syria to join the ISIL (ISIS) group.

The shootout had occurred just hours before Austria implemented new national lockdowns to restrict the growing number of cases of corona-virus.

According to the witnesses of the shootout, the shooter at one point turned back to shoot one of his victims a second time. Fejzulai, who Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said was an “Islamist terrorist”, was born on the southern fringes of Vienna to Macedonian parents. He was born on June 24, 2000, according to court documents seen by Austrian weekly Profil which was confirmed by a court spokeswoman.

The 2019 documents said,” Since puberty, the accused had massive problems at home, which also led to exposure to violence”. By the time he was 18 years old, he had drawn the attention of Austria’s domestic intelligence agency, identified as a follower of jihadist ideology.

In 2018, Fejzulai had attempted to cross the border from Turkey into Syria but was caught and deported to his native Austria, as stated by the country’s security chief Franz Ruf. The Vienna criminal court had sentenced Fejzulai to 22 months in prison in April 2019 for being a member of a terrorist organization and for spreading propaganda. Due to his young age, he had to serve only a third of the sentence and was released in December 2019. The court had found that Fejzulai, a soccer fan, appeared to be “open-minded and accessible”, and “certainly reflective and cognitively well-structured”. Little is known about his life after that, except that he took part in a de-radicalization programme, which was still ongoing when he went on his killing spree.

Nikolaus Rast, the lawyer who represented Fejzulai during that trial, said he was shocked by the news of the attack, saying that he would have never thought that the young man was able to commit such violence.

Austrian police have arrested at least 14 people in raids linked to the deadly attack in Vienna and have found no evidence that a second shooter was involved, said Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer. He further said that after initial investigations, police believe that the shooting in central Vienna was carried out just by the lone gunman, Kujtim Fejzulai.

(Source: Reuters.com, Al-jazeera.com)

The author is a member of Amity centre of Happiness