A 23-year-old man has been detained in the Austrian city of Villach following a horrific mass stabbing in which one person has been killed and four others injured
A 14-year-old has been killed in a horrific knife attack which saw a man stab five passers-by in southern Austria on Saturday
A 23-year-old man was detained in the city of Villach, where the attack took place. He is a Syrian national with legal residence in Austria, police said. Two of the victims, who were all men, sustained serious injuries while another two suffered minor injuries.
The motive for the knife attacks is not yet known, police spokesperson Rainer Dionisio said, adding that detectives were looking into the attacker’s personal background. “We have to wait until we get secure information,” he said.
An eyewitness, a 42-year-old man who works for a food delivery company, told local reporters how he saw the incident from his car. The man said he drove toward the suspect and helped to prevent things from getting worse.
Police said they do not yet know if the suspect was acting alone and they will continue to search for potential further suspects. Locals in the southern city of Villach, near the Italian and Slovenian borders, have been left shocked by the bloody attack.
Peter Kaiser, the governor of the Austrian province of Carinthia, expressed his condolences to the family of the 14-year-old victim. He said: “This outrageous atrocity must be met with harsh consequences. I have always said with clarity and unambiguously. Those who live in Carinthia, in Austria, have to respect the law and adjust to our rules and values.”
Erwin Angerer, a lawmaker for the far-right Freedom Party, said his party had been warning about the situation in Austria as a result of the country’s “disastrous asylum policy”. Austria’s Interior Minister Gerhard Karner was expected in Villach on Sunday morning.
Meanwhile a two-year-old girl and her mother were confirmed to have died in Germany after a car was driven into a crowd in Munich on Thursday.
