ISIS claims responsibility for Vienna attack

The ISIS extremist group claimed responsibility on Tuesday for a deadly attack in Vienna, in a statement issued through its Amaq News Agency along with a picture and video purporting to show the gunman.

The picture, released on Telegram, showed a bearded man identified as “Abu Dagnah Al-Albany.” The accompanying statement said he had attacked crowds in central Vienna on Monday with a pistol and machine gun before being shot dead by police.

In the photo, Albany carries a pistol, a machine gun and a machete and is wearing a ring stamped with a sentence saying “Mohammed is the messenger of Allah.”

For all the latest headlines follow our Google News channel online or via the app.

Amaq posted a video of Albany minutes later in which he pled allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Quraishi. He was speaking Arabic in the video.

Albany would normally be used to refer to someone with Albanian origins. The statement did not identify the man by any other name.

Austrian officials have identified the attacker as Kujtim Fejzulai, a dual citizen of Austria and North Macedonia, who had been sentenced to 22 months in jail in April 2019 for attempting to travel to Syria to join ISIS.

The gunman, who was killed by police minutes after opening fire on crowded bars, had been released from jail less than a year ago.

Read more:

Italy FM proposes EU ‘patriot act’ after attacks in Vienna and Nice

After Europe attacks, UK raises terror threat level to severe