Austrian police arrest man who appeared in public as Hitler

The house in which Adolf Hitler was born is seen in Braunau am Inn, Austria. (REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger /File Photo)
Updated 13 February 2017
Follow

Austrian police arrest man who appeared in public as Hitler

VIENNA, Austria: Austrian police have detained a man for glorifying the Nazi regime, after he appeared in public dressed as Adolf Hitler, a police spokesman said.
The 25-year-old was arrested on Monday night in Braunau am Inn, the Hitler’s birthplace, the spokesman said.
The daily newspaper Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten said on Saturday the man had been seen outside the house in which Hitler was born and in a local bookstore browsing through magazines about World War Two.
He had a Hitler-style moustache and similar haircut to the dictator’s, and wore “a suit reminiscent of Hitler,” the paper said, adding he identified himself in a local bar as “Harald Hitler.”
“It is definitely not a carnival joke or an art project, the young man knows exactly what he is doing,” the police spokesman said.
Hitler, born in 1889, led Nazi Germany into World War Two and the Holocaust. Glorifying Hitler or the Nazis is a crime in Austria, which Nazi Germany annexed in 1938. (Reporting by Kirsti Knolle)


Police suspect suicide bomber behind Nigeria’s deadly mosque blast

Updated 6 sec ago
Follow

Police suspect suicide bomber behind Nigeria’s deadly mosque blast

  • Nigeria police said Thursday that they suspected a suicide bomber was behind the blast that killed several worshippers in a mosque on Christmas eve in the country’s northeastern Borno state
MAIDUGURI: Nigeria police said Thursday that they suspected a suicide bomber was behind the blast that killed several worshippers in a mosque on Christmas eve in the country’s northeastern Borno state.
A police spokesman put the death toll at five, with 35 wounded. A witness on Wednesday told AFP that eight people were killed.
The bomb went off inside the crowded Al-Adum Juma’at Mosque at Gamboru market in the capital city of Maiduguri, as Muslim faithful gathered for evening prayers around 6:00 p.m. (1700 GMT), according to witnesses and the police.
“An unknown individual, whom we suspect to be a member of a terrorist group, entered inside the mosque, and while prayer was ongoing, we recorded an explosion,” police spokesman Nahum Daso told journalists.
Daso said in a statement late on Wednesday that the “incident may have been a suicide bombing, based on the recovery of fragments of a suspected suicide vest and witness statements.”
Police officials have been deployed to markets, worship centers and other public places in the wake of the blast.
Nigeria has been battling a jihadist insurgency since 2009 by jihadist groups Boko Haram and an offshoot, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), in a conflict that has killed at least 40,000 and displaced around two million from their homes in the northeast, according to the UN.
Although the conflict has been largely limited to the northeastern region, jihadist attacks have been recorded in other parts of the west African nation.
Maiduguri itself — once the scene of nightly gunbattles and bombings — has been calm in recent years, with the last major attack recorded in 2021.