Austrian police arrest 14 suspected of IS links

Associated Press

VIENNA

Heavily armed SWAT teams supported by hundreds of other officers detained 14 people suspected of having ties to the Islamic State group in early-morning raids Thursday, Austrian officials said.

An earlier statement from the public prosecutor’s office in Graz said there were eight arrests in twin operations there and in Vienna involving 800 police. But Justice Ministry official Christian Pilnacek later said the discrepancy was between the eight arrest warrants issued and the 14 people – 11 men and three women – actually detained.

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.”

Two of the 12 locations raided were Muslim social centers also used as mosques, Pilnacek said. The people arrested also are suspected of recruiting about 40 people to fight for Islamic extremist groups in the Mideast, he said.

The police sweep came less than a week after police in Vienna detained a 17-year-old they describe as belonging to “radical Salafist” circles who they said has confessed experimenting with building a bomb.

But the prosecutor’s statement said the 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 detained.

Austria has not experienced the attacks that have rocked other nations in Europe. But Interior Ministry figures show that approximately 300 people have left or tried to leave Austria to fight for radical groups in the Middle East since 2012.