You may vaguely remember that back in 2024, Taylor Swift canceled three shows in Vienna, Austria after authorities uncovered a terror plot. It was a big deal at the time, in part because so many fans had already flown in for the concerts.
Two weeks after organizers scrubbed Taylor Swift's concerts in Vienna amid a foiled terror plot, the singer issued her first statement on the cancellations.
"Having our Vienna shows cancelled was devastating," she wrote in a statement posted to Instagram on Wednesday. "The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows."
She thanked authorities — "thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives," she wrote — and said she waited to speak until the European leg of her Eras Tour concluded to prioritize safety.
This week, the man responsible for all of that pleaded guilty to planning the attack. He planned to do it out of his devotion to ISIS.
A man accused of pledging allegiance to ISIS and plotting to attack one of superstar singer Taylor Swift's concerts in Vienna nearly two years ago pleaded guilty as his trial began on Tuesday, Austria media reported...
The defendant, a 21-year-old Austrian citizen known only as Beran A., in line with Austrian privacy rules, faced charges including terrorist offenses and membership in a terrorist organization. He could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison, and has been in custody since August 2024.
The Vienna plot drew comparisons to a 2017 attack by a suicide bomber at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, that killed 22 people. The bomb detonated at the end of Grande's concert as thousands of young fans were leaving, becoming the deadliest extremist attack in the United Kingdom in recent years.
It's pretty hard to overstate how vile this is. This creep had quit his job so he could devote all of his time to his plot to murder as many people as possible at a concert venue. And let's face it, at this particularly concert he was mostly targeting young women who would have little chance of fighting back.
Apparently his plan was to show up with knives and a machete and kill as many women as possible before blowing up his car and killing even more "infidels."
🇦🇹🇺🇸 He planned the attack on the Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.
— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) August 8, 2024
"I have big plans" he told his boss when he resigned from his job.
He told the police: “I wanted to kill Infidels”
Beran A. had planned to blow himself up with a bomb in front of the Ernst Happel Stadium. What… https://t.co/tsYCHtDk23 pic.twitter.com/iqNjw61K6F
The plot was uncovered because the CIA noticed someone doing searches for hand grenades and instructions on building a bomb. He was arrested and police found TATP in his refrigerator plus a calendar that had Swift's concert marked on it. The arrested happened one day before the first concert.
Beran is expected to be sentenced to between 10 and 20 years which, to me, sounds like a slap on the wrist. This guy wanted to murder people's daughters with knives and explosives. I think a life sentence is plenty merciful and more than he deserves. Hopefully the judges dealing with violent crime in Vienna, Austria are better than the ones here in California.
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