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Austria: New spate of fascist letter bombs

01 November 1994

Four new letter bombs have been sent by neo-nazis in Austria. The targets were an advice service for immigrants, a paper factory employing immigrant workers, a religious hostel which house asylum seekers, and a publishing house which translates works by Slovenian authors. All were defused by the police. This series of letter bombs follows ten which were sent out in December 1993 injuring four of the recipients including the Mayor of Vienna, Helmet Zilk, who lost half of his left hand when a bomb was sent to his home address.

The head of the Wieser-Werlag publishers, Lojze Wieser, said they had also received a death threat in a handwritten letter with the Nazi salute "Sieg Heil" and swastikas saying "You are the first on our list".

These letter bombs coincide with the re-trial in Vienna on legal technicalities of the leader of the neo-Nazis in Austria, Gottried Kussel, who had been sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Raids by the Austrian police have made a record arms seizure during a sweep on nazi activists. Anti-terrorist police seized a Second World War Czech T-34 tank and a modern armoured personnel carrier during the raid at the village of Geopfritz an der Wild, northwest of Vienna. Police also found a cache of automatic rifles and 1lb of military explosives. It is not known if the explosives matched those used in the letter bomb attacks. Two men were detained in the raids.

The explosives find is interesting as Defence Ministry officials were forced by persistent rumours to deny any military involvement with the letter bomb attacks. Geopfritz is located on the periphery of Austria's largest military training area.

International Herald Tribune, 1.11.94; Evening Standard, 6.10.94; Balkan News, 16.10.94; Times 3.12.94.