CANCELLED: ISIS-Inspired Terror Plot Targeting Taylor Swift Concert Foiled

Taylor Alison Swift American singer-songwriter
Taylor Alison Swift American singer-songwriter. Credit | Getty images

United States: The Austrian authorities have said that the alleged terror plot corresponds to Taylor Swift’s three Vienna concerts and has followed a chilling pattern that European counterterrorism officials are well acquainted with.

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This prime suspect is a 19-year-old who was captured in Ternitz, about 1-hour drive from where Swift was scheduled to perform on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at Ernst Happel Stadium with expectations of 65,000 fans each night.

Police arrested the suspect, and in a search operation, police recovered from his house chemical explosives, detonators, ISIS pamphlets, knives, and machetes, as CNN reported.

Interestingly, he had a blue light commonly used by the police to put on their cars, which might have assisted him in driving towards the crowded incident.

Police also pointed out the specific involvement of social media profiles in the process of radicalization of the suspected perpetrators of the attacks and the planning of the acts.

Online chatting turned to plotting

Typically, the transformation of online teen gossip into a real-life conspiracy has recently become more frequent. According to a study by Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert CNN featured in the last month, over the nine preceding months, teenage suspects made up almost two-thirds of European arrests linked to ISIS.

Neumann, a professor of security studies at King’s College London, says that out of 27 ISIS-linked attacks or plots detected since October last year and involving 58 suspects, 38 involved people under nineteen years old, as CNN reported.

Another case that Neumann mentioned was another one in Austria in which a Montenegro minor girl 14-year-old, is detained in the southern town of Graz in mid-May for attempting to buy a knife and an axe for an intended act of violence. ISIS material was also spotted on the computer of the mentioned suspect.

Youths were also apprehended during France’s operations in preparation for the Paris Olympics.