Austrian public prosecutors filed terrorism-related charges Monday against a 21-year-old defendant who they say planned to attack one of superstar singer Taylor Swift’s concerts in Vienna in August 2024.
Vienna public prosecutors said in a statement that the unnamed defendant had declared allegiance to the Islamic State group by sharing propaganda material and videos via various messaging services.
Vienna prosecutors also accuse the defendant of having “obtained instructions on the internet for the construction of a shrapnel bomb based on the explosive triacetone triperoxide” typically used by IS, and of having produced a small amount of the explosive.
Prosecutors also say that the defendant had made “several attempts” to buy weapons illegally outside the country and to bring them to Austria.
Heinz-Peter Bader / AP
Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, head of the Directorate of State Security and Intelligence, said at the time of the suspect’s arrest that he wanted to kill “as many people as possible using the knives or even using the explosive devices he had made.”
Vienna public prosecutors plan to proceed with a criminal case against the unnamed suspect in Wiener Neustadt, a town near the Austrian capital.
The spokesperson for the Vienna public prosecutors’ office confirmed to The Associated Press that the defendant is in custody. Austrian media identified the suspect as Beran A. and said he was arrested in August 2024.
A total of three suspects had been arrested and charged in connection with the plot, including a teenage boy who was convicted in a German court last year of preparing a serious act of violence and supporting a terrorist act of violence abroad. The Berlin court gave Mohammad A., a Syrian national, a suspended 18-month sentence.
Austrian authorities canceled three planned Swift shows in Vienna in August 2024 after they said they foiled an apparent plot to target the Eras Tour performances.
EVA MANHART/APA/AFP via Getty Images 
The U.S. provided intelligence that fed into the decision to cancel the concerts. The move left tens of thousands of Swift’s fans, many of whom had traveled to Vienna from elsewhere in the country or abroad specifically to see a show, devastated. Concert organizers in Austria said they had expected up to 65,000 fans inside the Ernst Happel Stadium at each concert and as many as 30,000 onlookers outside.
“The United States has an enduring focus on our counterterrorism mission. We work closely with partners all over the world to monitor and disrupt threats. And so as part of that work, the United States did share information with Austrian partners to enable the disruption of a threat to Taylor Swift’s concerts there in Vienna,” then-White House national security spokesman John Kirby said in August 2024.
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