BERLIN: German police said Friday they are raiding apartments and offices over possible links to the Austrian Daesh sympathizer who went on a deadly gun rampage in central Vienna.
The sites that were searched in the northeast of the country belong to four people who “are not believed to be involved in the attack,” said the federal criminal agency (BKA).
“But there may be links to the alleged assassin,” it added on Twitter.
The searches were carried out on a request from the Austrian authorities and were aimed at “securing material that could be proof.”
“Two of the individuals are believed to have met the suspected assailant in July 2020 in Vienna,” the agency added.
The gunman, identified as 20-year-old dual Austrian-Macedonian national Kujtim Fejzulai, was killed by police after going on a shooting spree in Vienna on Monday evening that left four people dead.
Austrian police detained 14 people in the wake of the shooting, the first major attack in the country for decades and the first blamed on a militant.
Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine had reported earlier this week that the Vienna attacker had made contact with German Islamists during an attempt to travel to Syria to join the Daesh group.
The investigation has also led to Switzerland, where prosecutors have confirmed that two Swiss men aged 18 and 24 who were arrested Wednesday had already been the targets of criminal cases over terrorism offenses.
German police say raiding flats, offices over Vienna attack
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German police say raiding flats, offices over Vienna attack
More than 9,000 flights canceled as major winter storm bears down across much of US
- “Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X
DALLAS: More than 9,000 flights across the US set to take off over the weekend have been canceled as a major storm expected to wreak havoc across much of the country threatens to knock out power for days and snarl major roadways.
Roughly 140 million people were under a winter storm warning from New Mexico to New England.
The National Weather Service forecast warns of widespread heavy snow and a band of catastrophic ice stretching from east Texas to North Carolina.
Forecasters say damage, especially in areas pounded by ice, could rival that of a hurricane.
Ice and sleet that hit northern Texas overnight were moving toward the central part of the state on Saturday, the National Weather Service in Fort Worth said.
“Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X.
Low temperatures will be mostly in the single digits for the next few nights, with wind chills as low as minus 24 Celsius.
About 68,000 power outages were reported across the country at 8 a.m. ET, about 27,600 of them in Texas. Snow and sleet continued to fall in Oklahoma.
After sweeping through the South, the storm was expected to move into the Northeast, dumping about a foot of snow from Washington through New York and Boston, the weather service predicted.
Temperatures reached minus 34 C just before dawn in rural Lewis County and other parts of upstate New York after days of heavy snow.
Governors in more than a dozen states sounded the alarm about the turbulent weather ahead, declaring emergencies or urging people to stay home.
