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Known as the Austrian Unabomber, Franz
Fuchs, an unemployed engineer, was convicted on four counts of murder on
10 March 1999, for a series of letter and pipe bomb attacks that
left four people dead. He was also found guilty of more than a dozen
cases of causing grievous bodily harm with bombs.
Fuchs, 49, was charged with
planting a pipe bomb that killed four Gypsies, or Roma, on February. 4,
1995, at Oberwart in the eastern province of Burgenland, and 28 other
bomb attacks that injured a dozen people. His four-year racist bombing
spree started in 1993, and targeted mostly ethnic groups or people who
supported their rights as refugee.
Most of his attacks were attributed to
a mysterious right-wing group calling itself the Bajuvarian Liberation
Army. Allegedly the terrorist group wants to reunite German-speaking
peoples in Bavaria, the Alps and along the river Danube within borders
that existed between the sixth and 12th centuries. Although his defense
team argued that he had accomplices, prosecutors insisted Fuchs acted on
his own.
Though Fuchs was absent from most of
the trial because he repeatedly disrupted the court with nationalistic,
anti-foreigner tirades, he did make it into the courtroom for a final
statement. True to his past history, he yelled: "Long live the
Bajuvarian Liberation Army" and "Long live the ethnic German
group."
One of his victims was the former
Vienna Mayor Helmut Zilk, who lost his left hand in one explosion. Fuchs
was arrested after police were alerted by two women who telephoned to
say they thought they were being stalked. A search of his home in Gralla,
130 miles south of Vienna, produced five pipe bombs and a booby-trapped
device similar to one that killed the four gypsies in 1995.
According to authorities Fuchs set off
an explosion in his car to kill himself when he realized he was getting
arrested. The blast ripped through his car, tore off his hands and
injured two police officers. Fuchs was described by court psychiatrists
as intelligent but a fanatic bent on violence. He will serve his life
sentence in a prison for the mentally dusturbed.
Franz Fuchs
(December 12, 1949 in Gralla, Styria - February 26, 2000
in Graz) was a xenophobic Austrian terrorist. Between
1993 and 1997 he killed four people and injured 15, some
of them seriously, using three improvised explosive
devices (IEDs) and five waves of 25 mailbombs in total.
Although Fuchs' mailbomb campaigns
and his personality features (criminal psychologists
later characterized him as a highly intelligent but
socially inept loner) bear reflections on the American "Unabomber"
Theodore Kaczynski, his motives were entirely different.
His designated targets were people he either considered
to be foreigners, or organisations and individuals "friendly
to foreigners."
Mail
bombs and IEDs
In December 1993 he started his first
wave of mailbombs. Early victims were the priest August
Janisch (because of his help for refugees), Silvana
Meixner (ORF journalist for minorities), and the Mayor
of Vienna, Helmut Zilk, who lost a large part of his
left hand in the explosion. Other mailbombs which were
discovered and neutralized were targeted at Helmut
Schüller (humanitarian organisation Caritas), the Green
politicians Madeleine Petrovic and Terezija Stoisits,
Wolfgang Gombocz and Minister Johanna Dohnal.
While attempting to disarm an
improvised explosive device found at a bilingual school
in Carinthia, police officer Theo Kelz lost both his
hands on August 24, 1994. (Kelz subsequently became the
first Austrian to receive a hand transplant, and made an
impressive recovery.)
Franz Fuchs claimed responsibility
for his attacks in a letter to the foreign minister of
Slovenia in September 1994, in the name of the "Salzburger
Eidgenossenschaft - Bajuwarische Befreiungsarmee" (Bajuvarian
Liberation Army). In a number of subsequent letters, he
tried to give the impression of a larger organisation
with different units. However, from the second wave of
mailbombs in October 1994 not a single one went off.
On February 5, 1995, four Roma were
killed in Oberwart with an improvised explosive device
which was attached to a sign that read "Roma zurück nach
Indien" ("Roma back to India.")
Between June 1995 and December 1995
he sent three more waves of mailbombs. Wave number three
was targeted at TV host Arabella Kiesbauer, Dietrich
Szameit (vice-mayor of Lübeck) and a dating agency.
Kiesbauer and Szameit did not open their letters
themselves and were not hurt. Wave number four was
targeted at two medics and a refugee aid worker, Maria
Loley. One medic from Syria and Maria Loley were injured;
the other mailbomb, targeted at a South Korean medic was
discovered and neutralized. Two mailbombs of wave number
five detonated early in mailboxes, the remaining two
were discovered and neutralized. This was the last
incident before Fuchs was arrested.
Arrest,
trial and death
At this stage Fuchs had obviously
become highly paranoid. On October 1, 1997 near his
residence in Gralla, he followed two women in a car whom
he believed were observing him. When police attempted to
question him on what they believed was a routine case of
stalking, he produced another IED which he had kept in
his car, and detonated it in his hands in front of the
policemen.
His suicide attempt failed, but he
lost both hands, and also injured a nearby police
officer. Fuchs was arrested without giving further
resistance and, after a trial which many in Austria felt
had fallen short of making all attempts to uncover deep
details, was sentenced to life in prison on March 10,
1999. Through his unruly behavior during the trial,
Fuchs had repeatedly forced his removal from court
proceedings.
On February 26, 2000, Fuchs was found
hanged with the cable of his electric razor in his
prison cell in Graz. The prison physician stated
suicide.
Unresolved questions
Although the case was officially
closed after Fuchs had been sentenced, and although the
"Bajuvarian Liberation Army" was determined to never
have existed as a terrorist organization in the meaning
of the term, doubts remained whether Fuchs had actually
committed his actions without any support or tacit
knowledge from sympathizers.
A thorough search of the two rooms in
his parents' house where Fuchs had lived revealed more
IEDs but no traces of the equipment which he would have
needed to produce and handle the unstable explosives (including
mercury fulminate and nitroglycerol) contained in his
IEDs.
Most of Fuchs' "confession letters"
exhibited an aptitude at verbal expression for which he
was not known. Some had referred to internal affairs in
police procedures that were not accessible to the
general public.
Even more doubts remain concerning
Fuchs' death. How exactly a man without hands (Fuchs
consistently refused having his advanced prostethic arms
fitted to him) and under almost constant video
surveillance could accomplish the manipulations required
to convert an electric cable into a noose sufficiently
robust for successful self-hanging was never properly
explained.
Moreover, no prisoner (especially not
an obvious borderline personality disorder case with a
very recent record of suicidal behaviour) is supposed to
be in possession of anything (including belts and even
shoestrings) that could serve this purpose -- most
certainly not an electric cable.
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