Police have carried out a series of raids and made 14 arrests in the hours since a gunman murdered four people in the heart of Vienna.
The man blamed for carrying out the attack was a 20-year-old “terrorist” who was released early from jail in December 2019.
Security has been tight in the Austrian capital as police launched a manhunt for further attackers.
But authorities believe the gunman shot dead by police may have acted alone.
Interior Minister Karl Nehammer has not ruled out the possibility of a second attacker. Some witnesses spoke of seeing more than one gunman and police are still assessing some 20,000 mobile phone videos of what happened.
“Over 50% have already been watched but the assessment is not over. At the same time the videos already evaluated do not indicate that there was a second perpetrator,” the minister told reporters.
The attacks began at 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Monday night, opposite the main synagogue in a pedestrian alley called Seitenstettengasse, and continued until the gunman was shot dead at 20:09.
Police identified a total of six crime scenes in the area, as witnesses described seeing attackers opening fire on people outside bars and then chasing them inside.
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the four who died were an elderly woman, an elderly man, a young male passer-by and a waitress. Another 22 people were wounded.
It was clearly an attack driven by “hatred of our way of life, our democracy”, the chancellor said.
It also emerged that a police officer who was shot and wounded by the gunman was taken to safety by two men of Turkish descent.
“I took his legs, he took his shoulders, the police were there too of course and helped, and we quickly got him to the ambulance,” Mikail Özen, a personal trainer and mixed martial arts fighter, told journalists.
The interior minister said 14 people linked to the gunman had been detained. Most of the arrests were close to where he lived but two suspects were also arrested in St Pölten, to the west of Vienna.
What we know about the gunman
Earlier, Mr Nehammer described the dead gunman as an “terrorist”, who had been jailed for 22 months in April 2019 for trying to travel to Syria
The 20-year-old had been released early last December under more lenient terms for young adults.
Originally from North Macedonia, he had both Austrian and Macedonian citizenship.
Police have searched his home and seized video material. As well as being heavily armed, he was wearing a fake explosive belt, police said.
Source: bbc
