Especially with regard to the Vienna City Marathon at the end of April 2022, the threat was taken very seriously by the constitutional protection officers, even if the sporting event was not specifically the focus of the terrorist network.
The organizer of the Vienna Marathon (VCM), with more than 30,000 participants this year, expressed surprise in a statement that the event was said to have been the target of an attack. During the week of the marathon, at the usual annual preliminary meeting with the authorities, in which the Directorate for State Security and Intelligence (DSN) also took part, no information was received about a specific attack scenario and no organizational requirements or precautionary measures in this context.
“At the last VCM there was no indication in this direction and we hope that this will remain so in the future,” emphasized the long-standing organizing team around Wolfgang Konrad. Rather, the competitions were carried out without any changes to the schedule in cooperation with the authorities, the Vienna traffic police and private security services. “The event took place in a positive atmosphere and without incident,” it said.
Security concept ready
Of course, you have a safety concept ready with which, in coordination with the executive, you can react quickly and responsibly to extraordinary events and, for example, the race can be stopped.
According to the Ministry of the Interior, the IS supporters found in Austria are people from Iraq who are said to have played leading roles in the heyday of IS and have now been recruited to carry out the orders for new attacks by the top IS leadership in Europe . They have different immigration statuses from different European countries.
Other members in Europe
As has been established, other members of the network are also in other European countries and travel within Europe at short notice for conspiratorial meetings. Based on the persons’ past, the DSN therefore had to assume that they had extensive knowledge of how terrorist attacks were carried out and that the alleged terrorist supporters acted very conspiratorially.
Due to the threat situation presented, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution immediately took appropriate awareness-raising and protective measures in relation to the sporting event mentioned and intensive investigative actions to avert danger and clarify the network. It turned out that the people in Austria who can be attributed to the IS only use encryption technology for joint communication and hold personal meetings very conspiratorially or as secretly as possible. For example, it was found that the network used, among other things, chat functions of individual video games on game consoles.
The DSN’s investigative work in connection with the possible attack plans and the disclosure of the cell network is still ongoing. So far, the investigations have also shown that the network finances the terrorist organization Islamic State from Austria. In this context, the DSN also takes investigative actions for prohibited terrorist financing.
Increase in terrorist intentions in Austria
After the Islamist terrorist attack in Vienna in November 2020 and a noticeable decrease in the activities of Islamist terrorist networks in Austria as a result of the investigations, an increase in terrorist or Islamist-extremist intentions can currently be observed in Austria due to the geopolitical situation and the above-mentioned call by the IS leadership .
After the killing of the former leader of the so-called Islamic State (IS), Abu Ibrahim Al-Hashemi Al-Quraishi, IS spokesman Abu Omar Al-Muhajir called for retaliatory strikes throughout Europe. In particular, large crowds of people in Europe should be selected on behalf of the IS for carrying out terrorist attacks. In Austria, this threat led, among other things, to an increased use of resources in the DSN in the area of Islamist extremism.
Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) saw the success of the DSN as proof “that after the reorganization it was possible to restore international trust in the Austrian state security service.”
Source: Nachrichten
