Olga Mavrou: How the Vienna jihadist completely fooled the judges…

Like the 18-year-old Chechen who beheaded the professor in Paris, the Vienna butcher looked like an angry young man like all others, like the 20-year-old Tunisian who smiled and convinced the Italians in Bari that in “Europe he was looking for a better fate”. In fact, he was on orders to heads in Nice. So 20-year-old Quidim Fetzulai convinced listeners that “instead of choosing a martial arts gym, he made the mistake of going to a mosque and ended up with ISIS.”

He was considered harmless and remorseful when (after being arrested and serving a short sentence), he said he was wrong and he knew it and that he went as a mercenary because he only wanted to be financially independent. Thus, he was released, because his adolescence was used as a mitigating circumstance in his defense. That was when he was 18, when he was arrested because he wanted to join ISIS. In fact, his own mother, who was frightened at the time, had informed the authorities, crying and saying to the lawyer, “What went wrong? What did I not do well? Why did he go to Syria or Afghanistan and be killed! Why?”

What is going on with this new generation of Islamists in Europe? Why did no one predict that they would appear, sooner or later? And most importantly, why aren’t countries shielded, anticipating radicalization that is always in operation (therefore it is predictable) in the same way (mosques and the internet), targeting vulnerable young people in a cold calculated way?

The lawyer who took him on (because he felt sorry for his mother, as he said) managed to get him off even though he had been sentenced to 22 months in prison for liking ISIS and for trying to join him. He served seven months in a juvenile detention center. Shortly after his release, he rented a 40-square-meter studio apartment last May where he lived alone.

No one knows where he found the money for the house and the weapons he later used. And no neighbor noticed anything strange all these months in the young tenant, who was already deeply determined to give meaning to his life, by taking away the lives of others. Authorities believe that in July he made another attempt to go to the Middle East, but something went wrong and he stayed in Vienna, or took on a mission, probably the one he finally carried out.

The turn to extreme Islam

The parents, with passports from North Macedonia, lived in a poor house in a mountainous Albanian-speaking village near the border with Kosovo until they were 30. They immigrated to Austria in 2000 and so the son was born there. In fact, they consciously sought to have their child born in Europe. But at 16 the teenager made his own revolution and turned to Islam with passion. No, he would not become European. Every summer in the meantime he went uninterruptedly and stayed with his grandfather in his particular homeland. Even the grandfather did not realize that something was wrong even though he lived with him for many months every year.

The father was a gardener and the mother a housewife, living in an apartment with a rent subsidy from the Austrian state. They had tried hard to calm him down when he started to show delinquency. He became involved with Islamic preachers at the age of 16 and after that began frequenting a mosque that was targeted by the security authorities as a jihadist recruiting station. It should be noted that the parents of the Tunisian who shed blood in Nice suffered the same fate: suddenly at the age of 16 he began to have in his mind only the mosque and prayer. Whatever was said to him, did not detach him from the Qur’an.

Fetzulai’s parents despaired because they were hardworking people, determined to integrate into Austrian society, into the European way of life, for a better future. So, they did not have much to do with mosques and imams. The son, however, left technical high school and had in mind only the mosque and religion. Tensions in the family began.

The jihadist of Vienna

The young man raised money working in the summer and took the plane from Vienna to Istanbul. From there he traveled to Antioch in the Turkish province of Hatay, near the Syrian border. While there he lived in a shack. He was also arrested there, as his mother had notified the Austrian authorities, who in turn informed the Turkish authorities.

He was returned to Vienna, where he was held for seven months. When he was 18 or 19, he appeared with his lawyer in court to ask for his release. He had made a mistake, he said. He was in his teens. He also attended a reintegration program in prison. “You are right, I just went into the wrong mosque and got involved, I was looking for a better life,” he told the judges and persuaded them to be released. “All I wanted was action and money to support myself, to have a better life, to be financially independent,” he said. His parents listened in surprise and at the same time full of hope. Everyone wanted to believe that “the child came to his senses” and that he would find his way like any young Viennese.

But adolescence is lost in a social Bermuda triangle, some part in politics, another in religion, and another in sports hooliganism. Young people, who have not found balance, find a home where life takes them. A little more than boys, a little less than men. Often girls who are not women yet. Fetjulai convinced everyone that everything was going well, while he was preparing to leave again for Afghanistan or Syria. He recently made a video in which the supposedly reformed youth swears allegiance to ISIS leader Abdullah Qurdas, the successor to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He then took up arms and did his “duty”.

Confusing martial arts with Islam!

The question is whether young people like Fetjulai are really so convincing masquerading as the “nice troubled young man who wants a chance at a better life”, or if society ultimately has no way to reform them and raises its hands, hoping that everything will somehow automatically turn out well.

“I wanted to get away from my parents, I had dreams for a better life, to have my own house, money to live on, not to depend on anyone,” he apologized. “When the police found me (in Turkey), I had spent two days and nights in a ruin without a bathroom, toilet, without even drinking water,” he told the judges, clearly showing remorse for his choice. His lawyer in 2019, Nikolaus Rast, told judges that the young man had renounced ISIS.

“At this age, boys are confused. Instead of going to a kung fu school for martial arts, he went to the mosque with the fanatics. We cannot change the ideology of a fanatic who wants to carry out a suicide bombing with fines and penalties. We can only convince him. And this teen is no longer dangerous. He is a young man looking for his place in society, he was obviously in the wrong mosque and ended up in the wrong company,” he said. And it was accepted. And although the teenager went to a monitored mosque, the Austrian authorities admit that they did not consider him dangerous and simply had him “in mind”.

Do they fool everyone?

When the incident happened, the lawyer said, “I still can’t believe it, neither I nor his parents. It is inconceivable to them what their son suffered. But I was also shocked. He seemed completely safe now. ” We have not seen an interview of the judges who released him, but logically they too would be flabbergasted or they would pose the alibi that normally he had to be watched by some people after he left the penitentiary. Even the police officers who were supposed to have him “in mind” did not, however, seem to have done anything to prevent harm. Is it true that it is so difficult to monitor the cell phones and contacts of these people in Austria?

There are 90 Austrian citizens registered because they wanted to travel to Syria to join ISIS. Fetzulai, like many of them, had dual citizenship – Austrian and North Macedonian. The suspected contacts of the perpetrator (already arrested) include three young people with the same origin and dual citizenship.

As far as the authorities know, 150 young people left North Macedonia for ISIS in 2012. About 70 returned. Three of the 70 who returned were arrested in Skopje a month ago. They are being held on suspicion of plotting an attack and are accused of recruiting young people. It is not known how many people left Kosovo and Albania for ISIS. But in Skopje and Vienna, they say they know.

A 16-year-old no one protected

A year ago, the same Austrian lawyer defended an 18-year-old Afghan man who stabbed his 16-year-old sister furiously for “dishonoring the family”. This office systematically deals with Muslim affairs, because perhaps one of the firm’s partners is a Muslim of Balkan origin. In this case, the girl just did not want to wear a headscarf. Nobody saved her.

She had asked for the protection of the authorities, she had clearly stated that she was in danger from her father and her brother, but no one protected her because everyone considered it “a normal family affair between Muslims” and “we can not enter into cultural customs of any minority “. The lawyer then said that the family that had poisoned the soul of the 18-year-old was to blame. “There is no excuse for what the teenager did, but the responsibility must fall on the family that raised him as a fanatic, he is only 18 years old,” the lawyer said at the time.

The argument was not accepted and the 18-year-old was sentenced to life. At least he was not released with a note to keep him “in mind”. But the girl was now dead even though she had tried three times to convince the Police and welfare officers that father and son were dangerous. Four days before the murder she made her last attempt to save herself. She had again asked – in vain – for protection.

The 16-year-old who wanted to become European did not succeed, and some people are killed on the street because Europe ultimately has no way of effectively integrating those who really need to be tamed, those who with their mediocre intelligence, their unhappy lives, with some unresolved mental issues ultimately have true power and the weapon of ultimate destruction: the invincible passion to self-destruct, but not before justifying their existence, exterminating what is different from themselves.