Bethany BellAt the court in Wiener Neustadt
Reuters
A 21-year-old Austrian man has been tried in a court in southern Vienna where he is accused of planning and preparing a jihadist attack on a Taylor Swift concert in the Austrian capital in August 2024.
Named only as Beran A, he was escorted into the courtroom in Wiener Neustadt, dressed in a blue shirt and handcuffed, to answer charges of terrorism and other offenses.
He was arrested after a CIA tipoff just before Swift’s opening concert in Vienna in 2024.
In total, more than 195,000 people were expected.
Beran A was tried with another 21-year-old man, Arda K, accused of being part of an Islamic State cell with him. They are accused of planning other attacks in Mecca, Istanbul and Dubai.
Monica Schipper/Getty Images
Before the trial, Anna Mair, Beran A’s lawyer, said her client would plead partly guilty.
Prosecutors in Vienna accused him of being a member of a terrorist organization and of preparing and planning the attack on the Taylor Swift concert.
He is also accused of declaring allegiance to the Islamic State jihadist group and spreading online propaganda in its favor, as well as making explosives and attempting to illegally buy weapons.
Beran A is suspected of having obtained instructions via the Internet on how to make a shrapnel bomb, using the explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP).
The type of shrapnel was “specific to IS attacks,” the statement said.
Prosecutors accuse Beran A of receiving training from other Islamic State members on handling explosives and of repeatedly attempting to purchase various firearms and a hand grenade from illegal dealers, with the aim of importing the weapons into Austria.
Prosecutors say Beran A began planning the attack no later than July 21, 2024. He was arrested on August 7, a day before the first concert.
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The two men, who were teenagers at the time of the attack, both face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Last year, a German teenager was also given an 18-month suspended prison sentence for helping to plan the foiled attack.
Prosecutors said the Syrian national, named Mohammed A, helped Beran A translate bomb-making instructions into Arabic and put him in contact with an ISIS member.
The trial is expected to continue until the end of May.
Taylor Swift, one of the world’s biggest superstars, learned about the Vienna bomb plot while she was on the plane to Austria, according to a documentary about the Eras tour.
In her own words, she said the tour “narrowly avoided a massacre situation” when the CIA identified a plot to detonate a bomb at the concert.
Speaking to select members of the media, including the BBC, at the New York premiere of her new six-part Disney+ documentary, she said that after 20 years of performing, “being afraid that something will happen to your fans is new.”
In a social media post after the 2024 incident, she wrote: “The cancellation of our shows in Vienna was devastating.
“But I was also very grateful to the authorities because thanks to them we mourned concerts and not lives.”
The Eras tour, consisting of 149 shows, began in March 2023 and ended in December 2024.
It spanned five continents, selling more than 10.1 million tickets and becoming the first tour in history to surpass $1 billion (£786 million) in ticket sales.
