The 19-year-old, identified by Austrian media as Beran A., was described by neighbors as reserved but friendly before his arrest made international headlines this week when authorities announced they had foiled the planned attack.
His neighbors in Ternitz, a small town about 80 kilometers southwest of Vienna, were stunned by the allegations against him. However, several of them said he had grown a long beard and become more serious in the run-up to the foiled attack.
“It’s only recently that he’s become a bit unusual,” says Nicole Morgenbesser, a 33-year-old mother who lives nearby.
Morgenbesser said the teenager, who comes from a family of North Macedonian descent, always greeted her cheerfully on the street or waved from his car – until a few weeks ago.
“He stopped greeting me,” she said, expressing sympathy for the young man’s parents, who lived with him in a bright, freshly painted terraced house at the end of the street. Austrian officials conducting the investigation said the youth’s online self-radicalization happened quickly, leading to him swearing allegiance to ISIS in a video and telling people he had “big plans” after quitting his job last month. He is believed to be the driving force behind the plan to attack a soccer stadium where Swift was due to begin a three-day stint in Vienna on Thursday. He was the oldest of four teenagers arrested by police so far; the others are aged 18, 17 and 15.
“You always hear about such things, but it is something completely different when something like this happens on your own doorstep,” says Christian Samwald, mayor of Ternitz, a town of around 15,000 inhabitants, nestled between lush sunflower fields in a river valley surrounded by the green mountain slopes of the Gutenstein Alps.
Austrian investigators said the 19-year-old made a full confession. It is unclear whether he has a lawyer. The public prosecutor’s office said it had no information on the case.
The news caused shock and dismay in Ternitz, said Samwald, because there had been no previous indications that the young man had radical tendencies.
“The lesson from this is that it is difficult to prevent the radicalization of a person on the Internet,” he said.
The youth had apparently started an apprenticeship after the family moved from Vienna to Ternitz several years ago without attending school there, said the mayor.
The company identified by residents as their employer did not respond to calls or a written request for comment.
Family shocked
Dozens of residents were temporarily evicted from their homes on Wednesday morning so that armed and masked police could search the suspect’s house and confiscate chemicals, machetes and equipment that the plotters planned to use in the attack.
About an hour earlier, the police had arrested the teenager. A neighbor described this as a “scream” and “bang” outside, just a few meters from her front door.
Reuters spoke to more than a dozen neighbors who said the teenager’s parents were not home at the time and that police had told them there was a gas leak and that residents, including those living at a nursing home, should leave their homes.
Local residents said the parents returned after the raid and were believed to have been in the small two-story house when a series of charges against their son were read out in Vienna.
Knocks on the door went unanswered and there was no movement behind the lace curtains and partially closed blinds.
Close relatives of the family with roots in the North Macedonian city of Gostivar, hundreds of kilometers southeast of Ternitz, were also looking for answers.
“It looks like someone manipulated him, because we are not that kind of family,” said one of them in the village of Cajle on the outskirts of Gostivar. “We still can’t believe what happened.”
