A teenager arrested by Austrian authorities for planning to cause "bloodshed" at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna this week has only recently shown signs of becoming radicalized online and prone to violent acts, people who knew him say.
According to a neighbor, the 19-year-old, whose name, as reported by the North Macedonian media, is Beran Aliji, was withdrawn but friendly, writes Reuters.
His neighbors in Ternica, a small town about 80 kilometers southwest of Vienna, were shocked by the allegations against him, although some said he had grown a long beard and become more serious in the face of the thwarted plot.
"It's only recently become a bit unusual," Nicole Morgenbesser, a 33-year-old mother who lives nearby, told Reuters.
Morgenbeser said the young man, who is from a family of North Macedonian origin, always cheerfully greeted her on the street or waved from his car - until a few Sundays ago.
"He stopped greeting me," she said, expressing grief for the young man's parents, who lived with him in a bright, freshly painted house at the end of the street.
Austrian officials leading the investigation said the young man's self-radicalization online happened quickly and he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State militant group in one video. He had been telling people he had "big plans" after quitting his job last month.
The mastermind of the plot to attack the football stadium, where Swift was due to start a three-day tour in Vienna on Thursday, is the oldest of the four teenagers who have been arrested so far. The others are 18, 17 and 15 years old.
"You always hear about things like this, but it's something else when it happens on your doorstep," Kristijan Samvald, mayor of Ternice, a town of about 15.000 residents, nestled among lush sunflower fields in a river valley surrounded by the green mountain slopes of the Gutenstein Alps, told Reuters. .
Samvald said that there was shock and astonishment in Ternica due to the news because there were no earlier signs that the young man had radical tendencies.
"The lesson is that it's hard to stop someone from being radicalized online," he said.
The young man apparently started practicing after the family moved from Vienna to Ternice a few years ago and he did not attend school there, the mayor said. A company identified by residents as his employer did not return calls or a written request for comment from Reuters.
Dozens of residents were temporarily evacuated from their homes Wednesday morning so armed, masked police could storm the suspect's home, seizing chemicals, machetes and devices the plotters intended to use in the attack.
About an hour earlier, police had arrested the young man, amid what one neighbor described as a "shout" and a "boom" just meters from his front door.
Reuters spoke to a dozen neighbors who said the young man's parents were away at the time. The police told them that there was a gas leak so that the locals, including residents of the nursing home, left their houses.
Residents said the parents had returned after the raid and were believed to have been in the small two-storey house as the charges against their son were read in Vienna.
Close relatives of the family with roots in Gostivar, hundreds of kilometers southeast of Ternice, are also looking for answers.
"It seems that someone manipulated him because we are not that kind of family," said one of them in the village of Čajle on the outskirts of Gostivar. "We still can't believe what happened."
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