Austrian police force involving 800 policemen with the help of SWAT detained 14 people suspected of having ties to the Islamic State group in early-morning raids on Thursday.
As per the initial statement from the public prosecutor’s office in Graz said there were eight arrests in twin operations there and in Vienna. But Justice Ministry official Christian Pilnacek later confirmed that eight arrest warrants were issued and the 14 people,11 men, and three women actually detained. Two of the 12 locations raided were Muslim social centers also used as mosques. The people arrested are suspected of recruiting around 40 people to fight for Islamic extremist groups in the Mideast too.
Besides suspected links to the Islamic State group, Pilnacek said those detained were being investigated for attempts to try to set up a “parallel society … an attempt to create a kind of theocracy in Austria.”
These arrests are preceded by last week’s detention in Vienna of a 17-year-old they describe as belonging to “radical Salafist” circles who they said has confessed to experimenting with building a bomb. But the prosecutor’s statement said Thursday’s operation had been planned for “a longer time,” suggesting no immediate link. Pilnacek did not rule out some overlap to Mirsad Omerovic, a Serbian-born Islamic cleric sentenced last year in Graz to 20 years in prison for recruiting dozens of young men to fight for the Islamic State group. But he said he could not say there was a “direct connection” in the cases of all of those
