Austrian man goes on trial for 2024 Taylor Swift concert terror plot | Taylor Swift
The trial of a man accused of planning an attack on one of Taylor Swift’s concerts in Vienna nearly two years ago began in Austria on Tuesday.
The plan was blocked, but Austrian authorities still canceled Swift’s three August 2024 performances. The singer’s fans were devastated, but rallied to turn Vienna into a citywide trading post for friendship bracelets and singularities.
The defendant, a 21-year-old Austrian citizen known as Beran A, faces charges such as terrorism offenses and membership of a terrorist organization under Austrian privacy rules. He can be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.
He is on trial together with a second person named Arda K.
Beran A’s lawyer, Anna Mair, said Monday that her client plans to plead guilty to most of the charges but did not specify which ones.
He allegedly planned to target spectators gathered outside the Ernst Happel Stadium (up to 30,000 each night, including 65,000 inside the stadium) with knives or homemade explosives. In 2024, the suspect hopes to “kill as many people as possible,” authorities said. The United States provided intelligence that supported the decision to cancel the concerts.
Beran A allegedly established contacts with other Islamic State members before the planned attack. Prosecutors said that they discussed buying weapons and making bombs, and that the defendant tried to buy illegal weapons in the days before the demonstration. Prosecutors also said he swore allegiance to the militant group.
Authorities searched his home on August 7, 2024, and found bomb-making materials. The concerts were scheduled to start the next day.
“The cancellation of our Vienna shows was devastating,” Swift wrote in a statement posted on Instagram two weeks later. “The reason for the cancellations gave me a new sense of fear and tremendous guilt because so many people had planned to come to these shows.”
The trial is being held in Wiener Neustadt, about an hour south of Vienna. It was learned that the hearings will continue until May 12.
The Vienna plan has been compared to the 2017 attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, when a suicide bomber killed 22 people. The bomb went off at the end of Grande’s concert as thousands of young fans left, making it the deadliest extremist attack in the UK in recent years.
