An Albanian migrant wielding a knife attacked two men of Polish extraction leading to one fatality and severe injuries to the other man in Vienna’s heavily migrant-populated district.
Witnesses say the incident emerged out of an argument at a bar on the Quellenstrasse in the district of Favoriten in the early hours of Friday morning. According to reports two Polish men, aged 34 and 37, got into a heated argument with an Albanian migrant who took out a knife stabbing both Poles, injuring the 37-year-old and killing the 34-year-old, Austria’s Kronen Zeiting reports.
After the stabbing took place, the Albanian immediately fled the scene of the incident and managed to evade capture by the Vienna police. Both Polish men were stabbed multiple times with the 34-year-old man being stabbed 5 times and ultimately succumbing to his wounds, dying 30 minutes after the attack in an ambulance en-route to a nearby hospital. The second victim was taken to hospital with serious injuries.
In the morning after the incident, blood marks could still be observed on the walls outside the cafe where the attack took place and the owners of the cafe were reluctant to report the incident to the media, likely fearing bad publicity.
Vienna police officer Patrick Maierhofer said “witnesses have indicated that the offender may be known by name,” and that the police had already searched a house in the Floridsdorf district on the other side of the city, which appeared to be empty.
The authorities say they are still investigating the scene of the attack to try and piece together clues that will lead them to the suspect including gathering any potential CCTV footage of the nearby area.
Officer Maierhofer said that the cause for the argument was still unclear and that it was likely that the Albanian migrant had the knife on him before the fight took place.
The Favoriten district was also the location of an attempted mass murder in October when a man shouting “Allah-u-Akbar” tried to run people over with his car reminiscent of the Nice terror attack earlier this year.
The attack, which also took place on Quellenstrasse, is said to have been an homage to the attack by a Muslim in Graz, again where he used his vehicle as a weapon to run down his victims, as it occurred on the same day the Graz attacker was found guilty of murder by an Austrian court.
The case also bears similarity to the attack in the heavily Turkish district of Ottakring earlier in the year in which a Gambian asylum seeker stabbed a cleaning woman to death while she was on her way to work in the early hours of the day.
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