A 16-year-old has been convicted in Germany for supporting a foiled plot to attack Taylor Swift concerts in Austria last year.
The teenager, named Mohammad A, who cannot be fully identified under Germany’s privacy laws, was convicted of preparing a serious act of violence and supporting a terrorist act of violence abroad.
He was handed a suspended 18-month sentence on Tuesday. According to the court, he made a “comprehensive confession” at his trial, which was held behind closed doors because of his age.
German judges found that the defendant, a Syrian national then aged 14, supported the ideology of the Islamic State group at the time.
The court heard he was also in contact via social media with a young man in Austria who planned to attack a Swift concert in Vienna, had sent him a video with bomb-building instructions, and organised contact with an IS member.
All three of Swift’s concerts at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadium were cancelled in August last year after a terror plot was uncovered by authorities.
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Swiftie on cancelled Vienna show
Concert organisers had expected up to 65,000 fans inside the stadium at each concert and as many as 30,000 onlookers outside.
Authorities said the main suspect, now 20, planned to target those outside of the stadium and hoped to “kill as many people as possible”.
Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, head of the directorate of state security and intelligence, added at the time that the suspect was “clearly radicalised in the direction of the Islamic State and thinks it is right to kill infidels”.
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Swift later called the decision to cancel her shows in Austria “devastating,” and said: “The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows.
“But I was also so grateful to the authorities because thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives.”