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melada998

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Inscription : 2020-10-30

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Vienna shooting: The night my safe city lost its innocence

Vienna shooting: The night my safe city lost its innocence

In recent years, Vienna has built up a reputation as a very safe city, a place where many women feel comfortable walking alone late at night.

For almost four decades it escaped the kind of large-scale attacks that have hit places such as Paris, London and Berlin.

That changed on Monday night, when a 20-year-old gunman, described by Austrian authorities as an "Islamist terrorist", killed four people and wounded more than 20 others.

He targeted an area that during the day appears quiet and sedate.

Its narrow medieval streets are home to Vienna's oldest church, St Ruprecht's, and to the city's main synagogue, the Stadttempl, the only Jewish house of worship to survive the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938.

But at night, when its many bars and clubs open, it transforms into one of Vienna's most popular party zones. "It's called the Bermuda Triangle because you can get lost for days here, drinking and dancing," a friend told me when I first arrived here.

Nine terrifying minutes
In the cold morning light, you could clearly see the smears of blood on the steps of the Salzamt restaurant, in an old cobbled square, three minutes' walk from the synagogue.

A young German student, who worked as a waitress at Salzamt, was one of the gunman's four victims. She studied at Vienna's University of Applied Arts.

On one of its outside tables stood an upturned bottle of wine in an ice bucket and several glasses of beer, some half-drunk, one hardly touched - the remnants of an evening out cut brutally short by a gunman with an automatic rifle.

Behind me I could hear a woman weeping bitterly, crouched on the ground.

Central Vienna is small. I go running past this area on most days.

The shootings began at 20:00 on Monday. It was a warm evening, and lots of people were enjoying a final night out before a second coronavirus lockdown began in Austria.

For nine terrifying minutes, the gunman ran through the streets near the synagogue, firing into bars and restaurants, before the police shot him dead.

His other victims were:

- A 44-year-old Austrian woman who worked at a nearby company
- An Austrian man of Chinese origin fatally shot in front of a fast food restaurant
- A 21-year-old Austrian man, who played for a local football club. He was a Muslim, originally from North Macedonia.

The authorities say the wounded included people from Austria, a Swiss-German woman, a Bosnian, two Slovaks, and a woman from China, as well as a man from Luxembourg, an Afghan and three Germans.

'I couldn't believe it was happening'
Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said the gunman had been born in Vienna to parents who also came from North Macedonia.

People here are in a deep state of shock.

The synagogue was the target of a deadly Palestinian militant attack in 1981. It has been heavily guarded ever since.

But Rabbi Schlomo Hofmeister said his first reaction when he heard the shooting on Monday night was that people were letting off fireworks.

Do not want to miss the details of this story can be followed here. : slotxo

waxy

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Inscription : 2021-07-28

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Re : Vienna shooting: The night my safe city lost its innocence

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