Austria was rocked on Monday evening by multiple shootings across Vienna in what police described as a major terrorist incident.
Police reported several injuries and at least one fatality in incidents across the capital, including an attack outside the city’s main synagogue.
Video footage sent to the Financial Times by eyewitnesses recorded dozens of shots, and heavily armed police response teams in the centre of the city shortly before 8pm on Monday evening.
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz ordered the army to be deployed to protect sensitive sites across the country in the wake of the attack.
“We are living through difficult times in our republic . . . our police will take decisive action against those responsible for this disgusting terrorist attack,” tweeted Mr Kurz.
Authorities have shut down all public transport in the inner city and urged all residents to stay indoors.
Vienna’s police tweeted that shots were fired by a number of gunmen armed with rifles at six locations in the city. One person had died and several people had been badly injured, one of them a policemen. One of the gunmen had been shot dead by police.
A spokesperson for the Austrian interior ministry told local news agency APA that there had been one arrest.
One of the sites of the attack was Seitenstettengasse, which is where Vienna’s main synagogue, the Stadttempel, is located.
Oskar Deutsch, a Jewish community leader, said it was unclear whether the synagogue had been targeted. He said that the Stadttempel and its adjoining office had been closed at the time of the incident.
Karl Nehammer, Austria’s interior minister, told the ORF TV channel that the city was experiencing “an apparent terrorist attack”, and cautioned that the “situation is still evolving”. “We assume there were several gunmen,” he said. “Several people are injured, unfortunately, and some people have likely been killed.”
“Vienna is in a state of emergency,” said Andreas Peter, a local official with the city’s rescue service.
Video footage aired by broadcaster Oe24 showed a masked gunmen firing in the middle of a Vienna street, and a pool of blood in front of a restaurant.
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, tweeted that France “shares the shock and pain of the Austrian people, hit this evening by an attack in the heart of their capital Vienna”.
“After France it’s a friendly country that is attacked,” he said. “This is our Europe. Our enemies must know who they’re dealing with. We will yield nothing to them.”
He was speaking just days after a man armed with a knife killed three people in a church in the southern French city of Nice, in an apparent Islamist terror attack.
Last month a Chechen refugee killed a French teacher, Samuel Paty, in the street outside his school, saying he was taking revenge for Paty showing two caricatures to pupils in a lesson on free speech.