A teenager died and several other people were injured in Villach, Austria, on Saturday after a man attacked them with a knife, officials said. A suspect has been detained in connection with the attack; it is not clear whether he knew the victims.
The attack happened around 4 p.m. local time, killing a 14-year-old and injuring four other people, according to the mayor of Villach, a city in the south near the Italian and Slovenian borders. The police told The Associated Press that two people were seriously injured.
The suspect is a 23-year-old Syrian man with legal residence in Austria, local police officials said in an interview with Austria’s public broadcaster ORF. It is not known if he lived in Villach. The motive is also unknown, but police are investigating the suspect’s background, said Rainer Dionisio, a spokesman for the police department in Carinthia, the province where Villach is located.
Peter Kaiser, Carinthia’s governor, called for the “harshest consequences” for the attacker, saying the perpetrator “must be put on trial, imprisoned, and deported” in a post on X. The city’s mayor, Günther Albel, wrote on Meta: “To all those who sow hatred and violence, I say: You will not win.”
Several similar attacks in neighboring Germany in recent months, including a car attack in Munich last week, have pushed migration to the forefront of that country’s national election campaign.
Millions of Syrians have sought refuge in Europe after a popular uprising against the nation’s autocratic longtime leader, Bashar al-Assad, that began in 2011 turned into a civil war. The large migration has strained social safety nets in Europe and stirred concern about assimilation, which has at times taken openly xenophobic form and provided an opening for right-wing, nationalist political movements.
The collapse of the Assad regime in December prompted several European countries to pause legal proceedings on asylum status for Syrians. Austria has said it would plan to deport Syrians whose claims for asylum failed.
Violence is relatively uncommon in Austria, which was ranked as the fifth-safest country in the world as of 2023, according to the Global Peace Index.
