Austria is grateful to US spies who uncovered an ISIS plot against a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Chancellor Karl Nehammer has said, after the CIA revealed it provided the tip-off.
CIA deputy director David Cohen said “tens of thousands of people” could have been killed in an alleged plot involving knives and explosives during Swift's record-smashing Eras Tour.
Mr Nehammer is demanding that Austrian agencies be allowed to spy on messenger apps after they relied on the US to alert them to the danger.
Two teenagers were arrested after what Austrian intelligence initially described as a tip-off from “partner agencies”, widely assumed to be American.
Mr Cohen confirmed the US involvement, saying it passed on “information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do”.
“They were plotting to kill a huge number – tens of thousands of people at this concert, including I am sure many Americans – and were quite advanced in this,” Mr Cohen said.
Swift's shows were cancelled, to the disappointment of 195,000 fans with tickets.
“There were people who thought that was a really good day for Langley,” Mr Cohen said, referring to the CIA headquarters. “And not just the Swifties in my workforce.”
Mr Nehammer, who is campaigning to be re-elected on September 29, said in a TV interview that the situation in Austria remained tense.
He welcomed what he said was a restoration of Austria's foreign intelligence links after a previous spy agency was bogged down in political scandal.
Allies openly doubted whether they could trust Austria with sensitive information after police raids on the now-disbanded Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
“I am very grateful to the international agencies for co-operating with us on an equal footing again. That was not a certainty,” Mr Nehammer told Puls 24.
Monitoring of messenger apps by Austria's own agencies will be a must-have for Mr Nehammer's conservatives in any post-election coalition talks, he said.
He said it should be possible for social media companies such as Facebook and TikTok to remove Islamist content from their sites.
Detectives say the main Vienna suspect, 19-year-old Beran A, planned to launch an attack outside one of Swift's shows, where fans without a ticket typically gather and sing along outside.
According to investigators, he was radicalised online and had recently sworn an oath of loyalty to ISIS. He has partially retracted a confession, according to his lawyer, who said the plot was a fantasy.
Swift's final European concerts in London passed off peacefully after fans were banned from gathering outside, a practice known as “Taylor-gating” or “Tay-gating”.
