10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The National
Syrian teenager charged over plot against Taylor Swift concerts
German prosecutors said on Friday they had filed charges against a Syrian youth and alleged ISIS supporter linked to a 2024 attack plot on a Vienna concert by US pop megastar Taylor Swift.
The suspect, named only as Mohammad A., was accused of supporting a foreign terrorist organisation and preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state, federal prosecutors said.
He had, as a juvenile, started following ISIS ideology from April last year and had from July been in contact with a young adult from Austria who was planning a bomb attack at one of Swift's concerts, they said.
"The accused assisted the young adult in his preparations by, among other things, translating bomb-making instructions from Arabic and establishing contact with an ISIS member abroad via the internet," federal prosecutors said in a statement.
"The accused also provided the young adult with a template for the oath of allegiance to ISIS, which the young adult used to join the organisation."
Police first took Mohammad A. into custody last September in the eastern German city of Frankfurt an der Oder, where the then 15-year-old went to school, but later released him.
The federal prosecutors office in the western city of Karlsruhe said on Friday the charges were laid on June 17 in a Berlin higher regional court, which will now decide on their admissibility.
Three shows in Vienna that were part of Swift's record-breaking Eras tour were cancelled last summer after authorities warned of a terror plot by ISIS sympathisers.
Police detained three suspects, including a 19-year-old Austrian with North Macedonian roots, over the alleged attack threat, with the US saying it had shared intelligence to assist in the investigation.
Swift later wrote on Instagram that "the reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many had planned on coming to those shows".
