Image: VOLKER Weihbold
The model for the still relatively young intervention force was the Vienna Emergency Task Force (WEGA). “After the terrorist attack in Vienna, the people of Hamburg asked if they could learn something from us,” commander Ernst Albrecht told the Austria Press Agency on Friday.
The support patrol for difficult operational situations (USE) was created in Hamburg just a few years ago. The local police got support from WEGA. “We have been in exchange for more than ten years,” said WEGA commander Albrecht. The contact extends to joint training courses or assignments, such as during the course of the G20 summit in 2017 in the German Hanseatic metropolis.
After the Vienna Terror Night on November 2, 2020, the idea for a special unit based on the Vienna model came up in Hamburg, as the German news channel NTV reported on Thursday. “It then goes so far that the commander might come to visit, exchange information on the phone or even send a presentation with the operational concept.”
According to Albrecht, “rapid response” teams such as WEGA or USE are units that are also on patrol duty and act as a link between normal emergency services and counter-terrorist units. “Basically, the trend is going in this direction,” he said, referring to the creation of the Rapid Intervention Groups (SIG) in 2021 in the federal states. In this context, Albrecht also recalled the experiences of the night of terror. “It took nine minutes from the perpetrator’s first shot to neutralization by WEGA forces.” In Hamburg, too, the quick reaction of the police probably prevented worse things from happening, said the colonel.
According to the AFP, a nearby so-called support patrol for difficult operational situations (USE) arrived at the scene after just a few minutes, citing the Hamburg executive. The USE also consists of specially trained riot police officers who are on the road in emergency vehicles in the city area, according to an AFP report.
The Vienna police created WEGA in the 1990s in order to be able to react to the changed development of operations. “We’re certainly playing a pioneering role here internationally,” says Albrecht. He and his colleagues have already received news from Hamburg after the tragic operation. “A friend of mine called and thanked us for supporting them over the past few years and thus preventing even more deaths.”
In the act on Thursday, seven people died and the shooter himself, eight other people were injured. The police also counted an unborn child among the dead.
Source: Nachrichten
