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Vienna, Austria:
Two individuals together with one attacker have been killed in central Vienna on Monday night in what Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz described as a “repulsive terror attack”.
Police mentioned there was “one deceased person” and several other injured, together with one police officer.
Meanwhile, one suspect was “shot and killed by police officers,” Vienna police mentioned on their Twitter account.
The assault had been carried out by “several suspects armed with rifles”, and police added that there had been “six different shooting locations”.
Gunshots have been fired at round 8:00 pm native time (1900 GMT), starting on the Seitenstettengasse within the metropolis’s centrally-located first district.
The taking pictures started simply hours earlier than Austria was to re-impose a coronavirus lockdown to attempt to gradual the unfold of Covid-19, and bars and eating places have been packed as individuals loved a closing night time of relative freedom.
Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer informed public broadcaster ORF that the incident “appeared to be a terrorist attack” and urged Viennese to stay of their properties.
Nehammer repeated police appeals to residents to avoid all public locations or public transport, and frequent sirens and helicopters may very well be heard within the metropolis centre as emergency companies responded to the incident.
An AFP photographer mentioned that enormous numbers of police have been guarding an space close to town’s world-famous opera home.
The location of the incident is near a significant synagogue.
The president of Vienna’s Jewish group Oskar Deutsch mentioned that photographs had been fired “in the immediate vicinity” of the Stadttempel synagogue, however added that it was at present unknown whether or not the synagogue itself had been the goal of an assault.
He mentioned that the synagogue and workplace buildings on the similar handle had been closed on the time of the assault.
– ‘Cowardly act’ –
“It sounded like firecrackers, then we realised it was shots,” mentioned one eyewitness quoted by public broadcaster ORF.
A shooter had “shot wildly with an automatic weapon” earlier than the police arrived and opened hearth, the witness added.
Austria had till now been spared the type of main assaults which have hit different European nations.
French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that “we French share the shock and sorrow of the Austrian people”.
“After France, it’s a friendly nation that has been attacked,” he added, referring to the killing on Thursday of three individuals by a knife-armed attacker in southern metropolis Nice and the beheading of a schoolteacher by a suspected Islamist outdoors Paris a number of days earlier than.
EU Council chief Charles Michel tweeted that the bloc “strongly condemns this cowardly act”.
And Germany’s overseas ministry tweeted that the reviews from Austria have been “horrifying and disturbing”.
“We can’t give in to hatred that is aimed at dividing our societies,” the ministry added.
Czech police mentioned they’d began random checks on the border with Austria.
“Police are carrying out random checks of vehicles and passengers on border crossings with Austria as a preventive measure in relation to the terror attack in Vienna,” Czech police tweeted.
Czech Interior Minister Jan Hamacek mentioned in a tweet Czech police have been in contact with Austrian colleagues following the “dreadful news from Vienna”.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte additionally “strongly condemned” the shootings.
“There is no room for hatred and violence in our common European home,” he mentioned on Twitter in Italian and German.
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