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ZURICH: A 23-year-old Syrian asylum seeker stabbed several passersby in the center of the Austrian town of Villach on Saturday, killing a 14-year old boy and injuring four other people, police said, adding that the suspected attacker had been arrested.
Further details, such as whether the attacker knew any of the victims, remained unclear, a spokesperson for the police in the southern state of Carinthia, Rainer Dionisio, said. The injured were aged between 14 and 32, he added.
Such attacks are extremely rare in Austria. A jihadist killed four people in Vienna in a shooting rampage in 2020 that was the country’s deadliest assault in decades.
Villach is known for its carnival and is in an area that is a tourist hotspot in the summer as it includes one of Austria’s most famous lakes but otherwise attracts little attention.
“I have been in the (Carinthian police) press service for 20 years and cannot recall such an act,” Dionisio told national broadcaster ORF.
A man whom Austrian media described as a Syrian food delivery driver charged into the attacker with his car and prevented him from harming more people, Dionisio said.
The attack comes at a time of political upheaval in Austria as the far-right Freedom Party, which came first in September’s parliamentary election, said on Wednesday it had failed to form a coalition government. The president is now considering whether an alternative to a snap election is available.
Railing against illegal immigration and pledging to increase deportations to countries like Syria and Afghanistan, which it is currently illegal to deport people to, are central to the Freedom Party’s platform and appeal, and the party quickly seized on the Villach attack.
“We need a rigorous crackdown on asylum and cannot continue to import conditions like those in Villach,” Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl said in a statement.

LOME: Municipal and regional councilors began voting on Saturday in Togo’s first-ever senatorial elections amid fears that President Faure Gnassingbe is looking to use the new constitution to hold on to power indefinitely.
Several opposition parties have said they will boycott the vote, and civil society groups have denounced the parliamentary reform for the West African nation of 9 million people as rigged.
The new constitution replaces the direct election of the head of state with a parliamentary system, making the presidential position merely honorific.
Power will be transferred to the president of the Council of Ministers, a position currently held by Gnassingbe, who has led the country since 2005 when he took over from his father, who had been in power for 38 years.
Under the previous constitution, Gnassingbe was limited to one last presidential run in an election set for this year.
More than 1,500 municipal councilors and 179 regional councilors will elect 41 out of 61 new senate members from the 89 candidates standing.
The president of the Council of Ministers, or Gnassingbe, will appoint the rest of the senators.
“It’s a new constitution that we have never tested. We had to test it to see the sides that are not good and to appreciate the rest,” said municipal councilor Vimenyo Koffi, who voted on Saturday morning in the capital, Lome.
A leading opposition group, the Alliance of Democrats for Integral Development, or ADDI, has confirmed that it would participate in Saturday’s elections.
But several other opposition parties, including the National Alliance for Change, or ANC, and the Democratic Forces for the Republic, or FDR, have said they would boycott it, calling the overhaul and Senate vote a “constitutional coup d’etat.”
The ANC on Wednesday expressed its “firm rejection of this anti-democratic process that aims to install an illegal and illegitimate republic.”
Earlier in the week, FDR slammed a “parody” vote and said the Senate would be a costly institution “while our municipalities and regions painfully lack the financial means to address the population’s vital needs.”
The president’s supporters say the constitutional change ensures more representation.
Gnassingbe’s governing party, the Union for the Republic, won legislative elections last April in a landslide.
Opponents had called the ballot an “electoral hold-up” marred by “massive fraud.”