How the Taylor Swift teenage ISIS plotters slipped through Vienna's security cracks

Rise of extremist youths linked to bomb plot tests Austria's tough anti-terrorism policies

A police officer in Vienna wears bracelets from Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. The US superstar's shows in the city were cancelled over an attack threat. AP

When a phone rings at a former screw factory in Vienna’s old Jewish quarter, it could be a confused teenager, a hapless teacher – or a chance to stop a terrorist.

Austria’s extremism hotline fields hundreds of calls a year from people worried that a child, pupil or a young person they know is turning radical.

Many cases turn out to be harmless, says youth worker Werner Prinzjakowitsch, a former committee member at the counselling centre.

Teachers sometimes ring up about teenage Muslim girls who start wearing a headscarf. They are assured there is no need to worry.

In some cases, radical talk proves to be no more than teenagers acting up, trying to shock their parents or teachers.

But more and more youngsters are being caught up in real extremism. Some view ISIS propaganda online. About two weeks ago, two teenagers were arrested for allegedly plotting an attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.

Swift's shows at the 65,000-seat Ernst Happel Stadium were cancelled, leaving her fans devastated and the Eras Tour megastar with a “new sense of fear”.

She delayed commenting until her European dates were over, worried she might provoke those who wished harm to her fans to attack one of the remaining concerts in London.

In an Instagram post the US star expressed her gratitude to the Austrian authorities, “because thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives”.

“In cases like this one, ‘silence’ is actually showing restraint, and waiting to express yourself at a time when it’s right to,” she wrote, mentioning her guilt at 200,000 people missing out. “My priority was finishing our European tour safely, and it is with great relief that I can say we did that.”

Fear and guilt

Beyond the ramifications on the Eras tour and the prominence of the plot due to the global appeal of Swift, the arrests show how high the stakes are for Austria's battle against extremists.

The hotline funded directly by the Austrian chancellery is just one cog in an anti-extremism machine with more than 100 moving parts, bolstered since a Vienna shooting in 2020. And in the Swift case, “some part of the system failed”, Mr Prinzjakowitsch told The National.

It was only thanks to a tip-off from foreign spies, widely assumed to be American, that the plot was foiled, leading to finger-pointing as an Austrian election campaign swings into gear.

Detectives say the main suspect, Beran A, 19, an Austrian with roots in North Macedonia, had recently sworn loyalty to ISIS and changed his appearance to suit Islamist propaganda.

A redacted photo shows a bearded man brandishing two knives at the camera, with an ISIS symbol pinned to his shirt. He quit his job and spoke cryptically of having “big things” ahead.

“That could have been a point where one of his colleagues or one of his family could have called the counselling centre,” Mr Prinzjakowitsch said. “In this case, the system never started to work.”

Tough talk

Austria has spent years building a hardline reputation on security, immigration and Islam.

Foreign funding of mosques was banned in 2015. A ban on religious face coverings, such as the niqab, came two years later. A 2019 law sought to ban pupils under 10 from wearing a headscarf, but a court overturned it.

Ministers spoke freely about “political Islam” and “parallel justice” in ways that might have made people queasy in Germany. On the right-wing fringe there were references to the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, symbolising a defence of Christendom.

But the intelligence radar missed a trick in 2020 when ISIS supporter Kujtim Fejzulai shot dead four people in an AK-47 gun rampage in Vienna's city centre.

Fejzulai, an Austrian-North Macedonian dual national, was known to security services. After trying to travel to Syria, he was arrested in Turkey and spent eight months in an Austrian jail.

Within months of his release, he was seeking AK-47 bullets from an arms dealer in Slovakia, in a meeting reported by Europol. But Austrian spies dithered over whether it was Fejzulai in the surveillance footage and felt he would not be so bold as to buy arms on the open market.

The shooting sparked a new crackdown. Raids took place against the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah symbols were banned. The spy agency was replaced. Officials privately drew up a counter-extremism plan with more than 100 programmes and initiatives.

The plan includes counselling, community policing, youth workshops, media literacy training and interfaith dialogue. There are workshops for young people, leaflets for parents, political “deconstruction programmes” for prisoners, and “web angels” who try to reason with hardliners on social media.

Weak spots

Austria's policies have put it “at the forefront” of tackling non-violent sectarianism and groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, said Lorenzo Vidino, a prominent researcher who helped the government launch an Observatory on Political Islam in 2020.

But “when it comes to violent radicalisation, ISIS-inspired dynamics, Austria is not as aggressive and I would say probably not as good”, he said.

Youngsters today tend to be radicalised on social media, rather than in mosques or face-to-face conversations, experts in Austria believe. Led down rabbit holes by algorithms, they are sometimes indoctrinated in a matter of weeks.

It is suspected that Beran A was one of these. Although he has withdrawn a confession to the alleged plot, it is not denied that he has extreme views forged online.

Detectives said they found ISIS propaganda on his phone, and knives and bomb-making equipment at his family home in Ternitz, a town of 15,000 people south of Vienna. His parents were abroad.

It is alleged he was working with a 17-year-old accomplice, Luca K, who had Turkish and Croatian roots and was working at the Taylor Swift venue. A third teenager, a 15-year-old Austrian with a Turkish background, has been questioned over the plot.

Like Fejzulai, Beran A has North Macedonian heritage. Suspects in both cases have been linked to the former Tewhid mosque, accused of being a radical hotbed.

Rudiger Lohlker, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Vienna who has shared his expertise with intelligence officials, said authorities lacked understanding of young people and their cultures.

“We have multilingual communities, Albanian-speaking, Arabic-speaking, Turkish-speaking, Kurdish-speaking, Bosnians and Chechens too,” he said. “You have to have a vast knowledge of the linguistic problems of youth subculture in contemporary Europe, and the Austrians don't have it.”

How teenagers get radicalised

Experts who spoke to The National agree that the extremist scene is getting younger and more online.

“The profiles of the three people arrested show exactly that. We’re talking about teenagers,” Mr Vidino said. "That’s a dynamic we’ve been observing throughout Europe. The numbers have gone up substantially of very young people.

“We’re seeing a scene that is very much a TikTok scene. The role of mosques has gone down from 20 years ago, even just from 10 years ago. [The young people] tend to be, for the most part, not connected at least operationally to ISIS or to any structured group.”

Last year, 651 people turned to Austria's counselling hotline, an 80 per cent increase. About half were reporting possible Islamist tendencies. A feature that has become more common is a young person alarming relatives by converting to a Salafist form of Islam. There were also dozens of calls about far-right extremism.

Problems in young people's personal lives or a general sense of disaffection or disenfranchisement are often blamed for driving them towards radicals.

Extremists prey on them by offering ways to “fix something” and “be the kind of man that they should be”, said Wendy Via, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Similar tactics appeared to have worked on a Turkish teenager suspected of carrying out a neo-Nazi stabbing at a mosque.

Across extremist groups “there's almost a formula on how to recruit, how to radicalise, what buttons to push when you’re talking to folks”, Ms Via said.

A lawyer for Beran A said he swore loyalty to ISIS because “he found it cool”.

Adolescent issues such as problems with girls are another common feature, Mr Prinzjakowitsch said.

Claims have emerged of Beran A being violent towards female classmates, and there has been speculation about a misogynistic element to the plot against Taylor Swift concerts, often hailed as a safe space for women and girls.

Extremists could have seen a “gathering of independent, young women” as a provocation, said Prof Lohlker. “They are not attacking Coldplay.”

How to deradicalise them

If personal issues are often at the root of the problem, tackling them is the best way out, said Mr Prinzjakowitsch.

During the conflicts in Syria and Gaza, colleagues have asked him whether they need to clue up on Islam and the Quran in their work with young people.

“My answer is, from my point of view, definitely not,” Mr Prinzjakowitsch said. “You won't be able to discuss those religious things anyway with those people. First, they won't accept you, and second, you don't have the credibility.”

The better approach is to explore “what is their practical life, in our case in Austria or in Vienna, and how you can deal with that or help the person with that", he said.

“In most of the cases, basically I have to say that works. Unfortunately not in every one, as we could see.”

Some projects try to offer “alternative narratives”. Lessons are offered to schools on identifying religious extremism. There are leaflets for parents. The government wants to do more online.

But prevention projects lack funding and cannot always produce the kind of material that is most effective, said Prof Lohlker.

The kind of thing that works “is not middle-class Muslims who talk about the true Islam”, he said, but martial arts-based projects that promote social inclusion. “But you can't show a politician or a bureaucrat a martial arts video.”

Benefit of hindsight

The Taylor Swift case was hardly the first where extremist leanings seemed obvious in hindsight.

German detectives scaled back inquiries into Anis Amri, the culprit in a 2016 Christmas market attack in Berlin because they believed his radical tendencies had “cooled off”.

Ali Harbi Ali, who murdered British MP David Amess in 2021, was referred to Britain’s counter-radicalisation scheme, Prevent, while at school. He boasted he would “nod my head and say yes” to fool authorities.

Online, “it is very difficult to tell what’s a real threat. It’s very difficult to be able to identify somebody who is spiralling, who’s working themselves up to a potential violent event", Ms Via said.

People may be “leaving signs or making statements that could be questionable, but then you’re relying on people to report it".

"Even if they report it to the company, the company then has the same issue," she said. "Is it real or is it not real?”

'Islam debate'

The fallout from the Vienna plot coincides with campaigning for a September 29 election, in which the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) leads polls and is openly pursuing an “Islam debate”.

A flagship FPOe policy is to “ban political Islam”, something critics say would be impossible and could be discriminatory.

“It basically fits into a typical pattern of the extreme right instrumentalising terror attacks to push forward their own agenda, which very conveniently mixes terrorism, Islamism and Islam,” said Daniela Pisoiu, an extremism expert at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs.

“The typical feature of this discourse is basically to take individual events that have to do with terrorism or Islamism, and frame them as being something caused by Islam, and in the second step, to argue why Muslims generally are not fitting into European societies.”

Interior Minister Gerhard Karner could not resist a jab at the FPOe in a press briefing on the Vienna plot, saying it left Austrian intelligence “smashed to pieces” by feuding with spy chiefs when last in power.

Chancellor Karl Nehammer's government wants to widen Austrian intelligence powers to monitor social media platforms such as Telegram. Terrorists “do not communicate by letter”, Mr Karner said.

The centre-left Social Democrats want stricter laws on radical tirades against women and non-believers.

“It’s not like anybody has found a magic solution,” Mr Vidino said, but “I don’t want to be fatalistic and say ‘it happens, nothing you can do about it’. I’m sure better things can be done.”

Threat picture

Austria's terrorism threat level has been at its second-highest tier since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, which has raised fresh fears of radicalisation.

“The imagery emotionalises a lot, especially young people,” said Dr Pisoiu. “You have all the Salafi preachers online, on TikTok and Instagram, and you also have the ISIS propaganda instrumentalising this to motivate people to do something.”

Detectives have been combing through Beran A's possessions to find out whether a larger Islamist network has come to light. His Telegram account has been studied by intelligence agents.

There is talk of putting more money into psychological support, school workshops and exit programmes for extremists. People do sometimes call the counselling hotline when they themselves are the problem. In Beran A's case, nobody recognised it or acted on it in time.

“If somebody had found or identified this guy maybe just four or five months ago and worked with him,” Mr Prinzjakowitsch said, “and figured out some individual alternatives for his life, that could have been a totally different outcome.”