The Vienna public prosecutor’s office has brought charges against another violent supporter of the terrorist militia “Islamic State” (IS). As the spokesperson for the regional court, Christina Salzborn, announced, a young man (19) will have to answer to a panel of lay judges on 2 February on charges including terrorist association (Section 278b). He is alleged to have posted IS propaganda on his publicly accessible Instagram account.
The indictment also includes other offences that emphatically prove that the young IS supporter has a tendency for violence. On the 29 of May 2023, he entered a bakery branch with a alarm gun and aimed it at a man. Together with an accomplice, he then fired the alarm pistol in the direction of two people, one of whom suffered a blast trauma and the other an abrasion to the left forearm and tinnitus in the left ear.
Just four days earlier, the Islamist and an accomplice had threatened a man with a alarm gun outside Floridsdorf railway station. A dispute is said to have broken out early in the morning, in the end the IS sympathiser’s opponent had the deceptively real-looking weapon pressed into his face.
The 19-year-old had already made it clear on the 22nd of May that he did not necessarily need a weapon to hurt other people. According to the indictment, he allegedly knocked a man to the ground and then punched him in the face. The victim had to be treated in hospital with a displaced nasal bone fracture, a skull contusion and whiplash injuries.
Since April 2022, the IS supporter of Bosnian origin is said to have published songs of praise and battle chants of IS on Instagram and spread messages from radical Islamist preachers in which IS was described as a “fortress against the enemy” and “martyrdom” was glorified, for example. He also shared Instagram stories of two IS fighters. The trial has been scheduled for one day, and the 19-year-old faces several years in prison if found guilty as charged.
Neue Terror-Anklage: Gewaltbereiter IS-Mann bosnischer Herkunft vor Gericht | Exxpress