A Daghestani man accused of planning terrorist attacks has committed suicide in an Austrian deportation centre, hours before he was expected to be deported to Russia.
On Thursday, Austrian tabloid newspaper Kronen Zeitung reported the man’s suicide, describing him as a member of Wilayat Khorasan, a regional branch of terrorist organisation Islamic State. Other outlets later confirmed the reports with the Viennese State Police Directorate.
The Wilayat Khorasan group took responsibility for the attack on the Crocus City Hall concert hall near Moscow in April of this year, which resulted in the death of more than 140 people.
The 40-year-old man is reported to have planned attacks on Cologne Cathedral and St. Stephen’s Cathedral on Christmas Eve, together with two men aged 30 and 28 from Tajikistan, and a 27-year-old Turkish woman married to the younger man. Kronen Zeitung added that the group had been detained ‘shortly before Christmas’.
The four detainees were reportedly released from the Josefstadt Prison at the end of May, due to an inability to produce sufficient evidence against them.
The group was transferred directly to a police detention centre where they were detained pending deportation. Shortly afterwards, their residence permits were revoked and deportation following the end of their pre-trial detention declared permissible, on the basis of the ‘significant risk potential’ that the group posed.
The defendants had been in a deportation centre since the end of May awaiting deportation. One Tajik man had already been deported, with the woman expected to be deported to Turkey this week.
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