By Ryan Saavedra
(November 2, 2020 / The Daily Wire) Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz deployed the military late on Monday evening in response to multiple shootings that authorities said were part of a major terrorist attack in Vienna.
At least one person was killed and 15 others injured from the shootings that took place “in the heart of the Austrian capital, hours before the midnight start of a nationwide lockdown, one of several being imposed in Europe to stop the spread of the coronavirus,” The New York Times reported. “As the night wore on, more gunfire was reported elsewhere across Vienna’s First District.”
Kurz said that authorities were taking “decisive action against the perpetrators of this hideous terrorist attack” and that police had managed to already “eliminate a perpetrator.”
“We will never allow ourselves to be intimidated by terrorism and will fight these attacks resolutely by all means,” Kurz said. “So that the police can concentrate fully on the fight against terrorism, the federal government has decided that the armed forces will take over the property protection previously carried out by the police in Vienna with immediate effect.”
“The shooting comes after deadly terrorist attacks in France that have rekindled memories of 2015 and 2016, when Europe was shaken by a string of terror operations, many of them claimed by the Mideast-based group Islamic State,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “In the past two months, a Pakistani man stabbed two people in Paris, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin decapitated a teacher near Paris, and a Tunisian migrant killed three people with a knife in a Church in Nice.”
Austrian Ministry of the Interior Karl Nehammer said that the attackers were “heavily armed” and urged people to stay indoors.
“We have brought several special forces units together that are now searching for the presumed terrorists,” Nehammer said. “I am therefore not limiting it to an area of Vienna because these are mobile perpetrators.”
The Zionist Organization of America, America’s largest and oldest pro-Israel group, released a statement on the shooting after news broke that at least one of the six locations where the attacks happened was near a synagogue.
“ZOA sends our heartfelt prayers and stands in solidarity with the victims and their families of the intolerable radical Islamic terror attacks and beheadings and murders near Vienna’s main synagogue today and at Nice’s Notre Dame Church 4 days ago,” ZOA said.
“Once again, Islamists screaming 'Allahu Akbar' are attacking and murdering innocent civilians in the nations that gave these Muslims refuge,” the statement concluded. “ZOA calls on everyone including Imams and Rabbis and Christian Clergy and political leaders to support efforts by the French & Austrian governments to root out Islamic terrorists and those who aid and abet them. We also call on them to condemn those who support these massacres.”
This article was originally published in the Daily Wire and can also be viewed on our website.
