The
Islamic State Gunman who murdered four people and injured 22 in a
terror attack in Vienna on Monday was caught trying to buy ammunition in the summer, officials have admitted. Kujtim Fejzulai was not under surveillance despite having been released from jail only last December for attempting to join Isil. He had succeeded in convincing the authorities that he had been deradicalised, according to Karl Nehammer, the Austrian interior minister. It has now emerged that
police in neighbouring Slovakia notified the Austrian authorities that he had been caught trying to buy ammunition there in July. The disclosure came as one of Fejzulai's victims was identifed as Nexhip Vrenezi, 21, a Muslim originally from the same Albanian
immigrant community in North Macedonia as Fejzulai. On the night of Fejzulai's rampage, he was shot four times as he left a pub to have a cigarette. There is no indication that the two men knew each other. Meanwhile the Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, said that he would use an EU summit next month to urge fellow
European Union leaders to unite together against political Islam. His words echoed those of President
Emmanuel Macron of
France, who has said in the wake of recent terror attacks on French soil that Islamism was incompatible with French values. “I expect an end to the misconceived tolerance and for all the nations of Europe to finally realise how dangerous the ideology of political Islam is for our freedom and the European way of life,” Mr Kurz told Die Welt, a German newspaper. Fejzulai's attempts to buy ammunition in Slovakia has highlighted its reputation as one of the easier places in Europe to buy weapons. Two of the gunmen who carried out the 2015 attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in
Paris obtained assault rifles there. But the country has tightened gun controls since then and Fejzulai was refused ammunition because he did not have a valid gun license. He travelled there with another man in a car registered to the mother of another known Islamist. Mr Nehammer told a press conference the warning from Slovakia had been investigated by Austria’s BVT domestic intelligence agency. He put the fact it was not acted on further down to a “failure of communication” and pledged to set up an independent inquiry.