Austria school shooter posted twisted photo of himself minutes before massacre
The Austria school massacre gunman posted sick images of himself just minutes before he slaughtered nine pupils and a teacher. Artur A photographed himself in the toilet of Dreierschützengasse high school in Graz minutes before Tuesday's seven-minute attack.
The image shows him, dressed in black jump boots and black army style trousers, hiding in a cubicle as he gets ready for his murder mission, taking an image from his lap. He posted the photo on X; he also left a video message for his mother, and a suicide note. It was published at 9.43am on Tuesday, just five minutes before he entered two classrooms to murder nine boys and girls, and one teacher.
He also posted an image of his weapons, a Mercury double-barrelled shotgun and a Glock 19 handgun, with the sick message: "Veeeeerrry early birthday present for myself." His social media profiles also mention the Columbine school massacre in the US with an image of the killer and a message, again in English, stating: "They look like Monsters to you?"
The posts emerged as police built up a profile of the killer, a loner who was obsessed with online gaming. They revealed that he had few friends and spent most of his free time playing Call of Duty or Valorant as an 'on-line shooter'. He had been obsessed with Columbine and other US school massacres. One of his followers posted the message 'my hero' beneath one reference to Columbine, which resulted in 14 deaths in 1999.
It was carried out by gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who also took their own lives after the shooting. Artur posted images of the guns on the platform Tumblr days before the Fraz attack. He was due to turn 22 in a matter of weeks.
He carried out the massacre in just seven minutes, police revealed. He shot through a classroom door after terrified pupils had barricaded themselves inside as he carried out his murder mission.
The first police response team arrived within six minutes of the alarm being raised at 10am on Tuesday. Elite Cobra anti terror officers entered the building after 17 minutes.
But it was too late. They found only bodies, horrified survivors and multiple casualties. Artur, who said he was bullied at the school, had been planning his rampage for months.
He fired indiscriminately, killing the child of one of his neighbours in the bloodshed. He had made plans for a bomb attack found alongside a 'non functional' pipe device at his home.
Artur A did not know the pupils he killed but one of the two teachers he shot had once taught him. He had also been to a local firing range in the weeks leading up to the attack and was armed with a Mercury double-barrelled shotgun and a Glock 19 handgun in the shooting.
Michael Lohnegger, the head of Styria province's criminal police office, said that he had a backpack containing the weapons. He put on equipment including shooting glasses and a headset in the bathroom before starting the seven-minute shooting spree.
He opened fire on the building's third floor before shooting open the locked door of a fourth-floor classroom. Once inside, he again fired indiscriminately. He had enough ammunition to continue shooting but instead went to a bathroom and fatally shot himself in the head.
He left a farewell letter and video, "an apology for the crime and a thank you" to his mum, but offered "no motive". Authorities also found a handwritten note that showed he had planned the attack "down to the smallest detail".
He set out what he was going to do, but gave no date for the planned attack. The note had suggested that he had lacked enough time to build a pipe bomb. Investigators had found one but it would not have detonated.
Mr Lohnegger said a picture had emerged of a "very introverted person" who loved online shooting games but had limited contact with the outside world. "He never expressed any anger or resentment towards the school, students or teachers," he added. He had no previous police record and "there were definitely no particular problems with him at this school". The gunman was in unspecified "vocational training" at the time of the attack.
He had bought the shotgun legally in Graz in early April and the handgun from another shop in the city in late May. He had a licence for the weapons that required a report from a psychological expert.
He did shooting practice five times in March using a hired firearm at a shooting club in Graz. Six girls and three boys aged between 14 and 17 and a female teacher, 57, were killed in the attack. The 11 injured, aged between 15 and 26, are not in a critical condition.
Artur, who has not been officially named, was born in Styria, the region which includes Graz, Austria's second biggest city. He lived with his single mum, who was also Austrian. His dad, of Armenian origin, had not lived with them since his parents' separation.
Hundreds of people will be interviewed by police and the attack may be reconstructed. The quick response time on Tuesday "appeared to have saved lives". President Alexander van der Bellen suggested Austria's gun laws could be changed in the wake of the attack.
"If we come to the conclusion that the gun law needs to be changed, then we will do so," he said. Relatives of the victims and school pupils are being cared for at a crisis intervention centre set up across the road from the school.
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But this happened on the 'mainland' too: in 1914, a 'British Covenant' also attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures. Its journal's motto was 'put your trust in God and keep your powder dry'. With armed volunteers openly drilling in Glasgow, Liverpool and London, and the army's willingness to enforce Home Rule in doubt, Britain was, according to the historian Dan Jackson 'arguably on the verge of civil war'. The outbreak of European conflict cut this off, but in 1916 Dublin witnessed violent rebellion against the London government. After the 1918 armistice, as full-scale war erupted in Ireland, waves of industrial strife crashed through a Britain full of angry young veterans. The government's response was sometimes startlingly militarised. In 1921, David Lloyd George solemnly announced to the Commons that he was setting up a civil defence force of volunteers to resist a joint strike by miners, railwaymen and transport workers, describing the situation as 'analogous to civil war', in the teeth of which his government were committing themselves to 'almost warlike' measures. 'For the first time in history,' he declared, according to the Times, a British government was 'confronted by an attempt to coerce the country by the destruction of its resources. The government proposed, therefore, to call for volunteers to save the mines. These men would need protection, and so a special appeal would be issued to citizens to enlist in an emergency defence force.' Union leaders lambasted the government for blithely taking on 'the grave responsibility of provoking bloodshed and civil war'. By the start of the following week, 70,000 men had joined the Defence Force. In the end, the rail and transport unions backed off, but the emerging struggle for power between the state and unionised labour continued to simmer. Days before the 1924 general election, the 'Zinoviev Letter' came to light, supposedly revealing a Soviet plot against Britain. The Daily Mail ran it on the front page, under the headline 'Civil War Plot by Socialists' Masters'. The letter was a forgery, but it hit home because in certain quarters, the scenario felt horribly real. With the Depression, and the fall of a Labour government in the face of financial crisis, this intensified. In 1933, the Labour MP Stafford Cripps delivered a lecture setting out how a newly elected socialist government would need to face down aggressive establishment resistance by suspending constitutional norms, even temporarily becoming a dictatorship. In Democracy in Crisis, Cripps' ideological ally Harold Laski suggested that in such a 'revolutionary situation… men would rapidly group themselves for civil war'. Right-wing writers like Hugh Sellon agreed: such a crisis would 'almost inevitably cause real civil war'. Reading reports from Vienna of the bloody crushing of a banned workers' militia by the right-wing authoritarian regime, some on the left found it all too easy to imagine the same thing happening here. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe With the advent of the post-war settlement after 1945, such fears faded, for a time. When Churchill's Conservatives attempted to use them against Labour in the 1945 election, they embarrassed themselves. But the arrival of Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent began to provoke another nightmare scenario. Today, Betz's analysis refers to theoretical warnings that 'one of the most powerful causes of civil war' arises when a dominant group perceives it is facing 'status reversal'. This recalls the fear Enoch Powell stoked in April 1968 in his 'rivers of blood' speech. Powell uncritically quoted a middle-aged worker saying 'in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man'; this imaginary threat was the reason why Powell thought it appropriate to conjure visions of racial civil war. This didn't happen, but the fear that it might rippled through the Labour cabinet. Barbara Castle thought Powell had 'helped to make a race war… inevitable'. James Callaghan worried that Powell would trigger racial tension akin to the religious strife of the 17th century – when England really had descended into civil war. In 1972, something like Powell's vision was sketched out by the young liberal novelist Christopher Priest. Some of the scenes in Fugue for a Darkening Island prefigure Betz's vision of a near-future civil war today: of people fleeing 'feral' cities, and the establishment of 'secure zones'. The novel imagines a near-future Britain in which a nationalist politician preaching 'racial purity' takes power, as boats full of African refugees arrive in the Thames. The country splits into a pro-government, pro-deportation majority, and part-white, part-refugee resistance. As society disintegrates and people make knives out of bathroom mirrors, some flee the cities with their barricaded enclaves, only to find rural roads too dangerous to travel after dark, and that farms and villages that have become stockades. And while fear of racially inflected civil strife bubbled away through the 1970s, the stand-off between state, capital and labour returned. Around the time of Powell's speech, another apocalyptically minded public figure, Daily Mirror boss Cecil King, was also panicking about social collapse – because of imminent financial crisis. Nursing visions from his Irish adolescence, King took to asking 'If civil war could break out in Dublin in 1916, why couldn't it flare up in… London in… 1968.' By the early 1970s, as strikes spread and inflation pushed towards 20 per cent, even more measured establishment figures found it difficult to see a way through that did not involve the use of force to overcome the massed ranks of the pickets. Retired military commanders like Lt-Col Sir David Stirling, founder of the SAS, planned to helicopter a private army over picket lines to seize back worker-occupied factories. The Conservatives began developing their own – more cautious, but still incendiary – plans to defeat strikes. When these were leaked to the Economist in 1978, it ran them under a headline invoking the American Confederate surrender in 1865: 'Appomattox or civil war?' All this culminated in the miners' strike of 1984-85, during which leaders like Dennis Skinner warned that the army might be deployed against the strikers. That didn't happen, but nonetheless, the strike is remembered by many as a kind of civil war. Nothing so intense has happened since, but the idea still haunts our politics, as the background to last year's riots and the belated announcement of an inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave attest. Writers have continued to detect the phenomenon even in less violent events. In September 2004, a few protesters against the Blair government's ban on fox hunting invaded the Commons chamber, triggering the startling Daily Mail front page headline: 'CIVIL WAR' – an echo, doubtless unintended, of their Zinoviev Letter splash 80 years earlier. Brexit – which Betz sees, not unreasonably, as the trigger for today's divisions – was cast in TV drama as the 'uncivil war'. At least one leading Leaver saw Brussels as a latter-day Charles I. So contemporaneous fears of civil war sit in a long tradition – in which, so far, the most consistent thread is that they have not come true. Visions of unrest in the 1920s drove draconian new laws, but also moves to find compromise. Cripps' talk of suspending the constitution was driven by the urgency of dealing with mass unemployment; once the Second World War made this a more consensual goal, those scenarios became a relic. Powell's nightmare of racial civil war was chased away by the quiet efforts of working-class Brits of all races to make multicultural life work. And those 1970s calls to use force against strikers were made redundant by another shift in the bounds of the politically possible. By the early 1980s, inflation had trumped unemployment as Britain's overriding political fear; as the jobless total was allowed to rise, it undermined the unions' power years before the miners' began their last, doomed battle. So it may be that the return of talk of civil war is less a glimpse of our near future, more a signal that something has become intolerable. Clearly this is partly about immigration, but look beyond the fevered talk on YouTube, X and GB News, and something else comes into view. When Sky's Liz Bates challenged Dominic Cummings to explain what he meant by 'civil war', he didn't talk about ethnic strife, bar a passing reference to 'no-go areas'. He cited widespread anger at the decay of public services from closing police stations to inaccessible GPs, 15 years of flatlining pay, and repeated broken promises of change. This chimes with a public mood that More In Common and other pollsters have been reporting for months. Likewise, Betz mentions the pressures caused by financialisation reaching 'the end of the line'. The Starmer government knows it needs to act on illegal immigration, but if – if – it can deliver the economic change it promised, then it may be that the issue will become less intensely symbolic of wider long-term government failure. The real threat that talk of civil war expresses is that the public is so sick of being let down that trust in mainstream democratic politics may die. As in the past, such fears may help impel a government to break economic taboos and make people's lives better. There are plenty of worse scenarios, but if they can manage it, the talk of civil war will fade. And in 30 years' time, perhaps a new generation will find themselves expressing similar fears – and will complain that the British are always too complacent, and never think it can happen here. [See also: One year on, tensions still circle Britain's asylum-seeker hotels] Related
