Austrian police captured a Hamas cache of pistols smuggled into the country and hidden for use in future terrorist attacks, while British police simultaneously arrested a man in relation to the weapons.
A suitcase containing five handguns and ten magazines was discovered in a rental locker in Austrian capital Vienna on Thursday. Although possession of a handgun with the correct licence and background checks, it was stated these weapons had been smuggled into the country by Hamas operatives to be hidden as a “cache” available to terrorists.
According to the investigation that led to the capture, “Israeli or Jewish institutions in Europe were likely to be the targets of these attacks” by a “global terrorist organisation with ties to Hamas”.
Austria’s Interior Minister Gerhard Karner praised the international cooperation that led to the discovery and vowed: “zero tolerance towards terrorists”. Per Austria’s best-selling newspaper Kronen Zeitung, the weapons cache is linked to the capture last month of a whole alleged Hamas terror cell in Berlin. In that case, German prosecutors said German citizens Abed Al G. and Ahmad I, and Lebanese-citizen Wael FM were allegedly plotting to assassinate prominent German Jews.
Those men had procured an AK-47-type rifle and several handguns, as well as a “significant” quantity of ammunition. Other recent arrests have also centred around the existence of Hamas weapons caches hidden across Europe. As reported in October:
In 2023, seven men were arrested across Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands over an alleged plot to locate and excavate a lost Hamas weapons cache buried underground and then use it to launch attacks against the European Jewish community.
As reported in December 2023, the group had allegedly made several attempts to locate and dig up the claimed cache but had been unsuccessful. Responding to the arrest at the time, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency said of the plot that the men intended to “kill innocent civilians on European soil… to attack Israeli, Jewish and Western targets at any price”.
Simultaneous with Thursday’s weapons-bust in Austria, the British FBI-analogue the National Crime Agency made an arrest of a 39-year-old British citizen. He is said to have had “close ties to the weapons cache” in Vienna.
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