The 30-year-old is said to have tried to get the Vienna attacker documents for a trip to Syria. He was acquitted of terrorist allegations.
Because he is said to have tried to obtain false papers for the terrorist attacker in Vienna to leave for Syria, a 30-year-old was sentenced to five months on Friday in Linz for forging specially protected documents. The trial period for a suspended sentence has been extended to five years. He was acquitted of allegations of membership in a terrorist group and criminal organization. Not yet legally binding.
The public prosecutor’s office also accuses the man in custody of having known that his client had been convicted, that he was becoming increasingly radicalized and that he wanted to leave – and still wanted to get him the papers necessary for this plan. If the allegations are correct, it would result from the fact that the Viennese assassin had plans to travel to the war zone a few months before the terrorist attack.
The prosecutor began her remarks with the attack in Vienna, in which four people and the perpetrator were killed and several injured. The perpetrator “did not become an assassin overnight”. He had already tried to travel to Syria via Turkey in order to join the hostilities of the IS. But he was found in Turkey, extradited to Austria and sentenced.
Multiple criminal record
The Kosovar accused in Linz already has several criminal records, including six years imprisonment for a serious robbery. Because he knew that he would be deported afterwards, in 2019 he ordered Polish papers from an Italian forger in order to be able to come back to his family in Austria, according to the prosecution. He is said to have obtained fake documents for other family members through this forger. These crimes are not the subject of the indictment because they were committed in Kosovo.
The accused’s brother – he was sitting for the same robbery for which the accused had been convicted – got to know the man in custody who had once traveled to Turkey with the later assassin. This fellow inmate tried to get a false ID for his friend, so the accused came into contact. He ordered a German ID card from “his” forger and received 1,400 euros from the later attacker on May 14 of the previous year. He kept 600 and sent the rest on to the forger. But then suddenly it was no longer available. Ultimately, the defendant, who was now illegally in Austria again, repaid part of the amount to his customer.
Confidante?
On November 2, 2020, the day of the attack, the defendant reset his cell phone to factory settings, said the prosecutor. According to the prosecution, he knew that the attacker was a member of IS and wanted to travel to Syria via Turkey. The defendant himself “moved in the orbit of IS sympathizers” and it was clear to him that “no vacation trip to Turkey was planned, but that the man intended to go to war”. An organization like IS also needs a certain infrastructure. And the defendant tried to make them available.
For defense attorney Michael Lanzinger, the indictment of the Vienna public prosecutor’s office “clearly overshoots the mark”. If one followed this logic, one would also have to condemn “those who sold the assassin sausages and gave him food or who bought him a train ticket”. Nor can one naturally assume that the accused should have known that a trip to Turkey was concealing IS support, he said in a general sense.
Co-science not proven
His client pleaded guilty to allegations that he was responsible for forging documents. Including the cases from Kosovo that were not co-accused, he obtained six false documents for himself or for relatives and acquaintances in 2019. However, he does not want to have anything to do with the accusation of involvement in a terrorist or a criminal organization. He “never saw” the assassin personally, only wrote with him. However, he asked regularly for the document “from May to October” in 2020. “I didn’t know what he was going to do with it or who he was. He wanted a document and I wanted my money,” said the 30-year-old. If he “had known that he was a terrorist”, he would not have gotten the papers for him “for no money in the world”.
The brother’s former fellow inmate was then questioned via video conference. The man who is currently in custody said that he spoke to the defendant’s brother about religion, but not about IS. He claims to have never mentioned the name of the later assassin either in conversations with his fellow inmate or in chats with the accused. He does not believe that he wanted to go to Syria again in 2020, but he did have plans to travel to Turkey.
The court did not consider it proven that the accused knew about the radicalization or the plans to leave the later assassin. In this way, the man was acquitted of the allegations of the terrorist and criminal organization in case of doubt. He accepted the judgment, the public prosecutor made no statement, so the judgment is not final. The man is now being released because he has been in custody long enough, but he is banned from being resident. He should get a visit from the Aliens Police soon.
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