Like countless mothers and daughters, Julia and Helene Schnizlein spent months planning their outfits and armbands for Taylor Swift in Vienna.
Their hearts – and those of 170,000 other Swifties – were broken on Wednesday evening with news of a teenage terror plot and, hours later, the cancellation of all three Vienna dates.
On Thursday morning Julia Schnizlein went to work as usual, as pastor at Vienna’s Lutheran city church, but decided to do something unusual.
She threw open the doors at 8am and began playing Swift songs through the church sound system.
All day a steady stream of singing, weeping and hugging fans filled the benches, finding peace and solace.
“The idea was to offer a place of comfort for all this emotion,” said the 45-year-old pastor to The Irish Times.
As news of the church gathering spread midmorning, Austrian police went public with a staggering litany of the massacre that might have been.
Early on Wednesday, after a tip-off from US intelligence, special forces raided a home in Ternitz, an hour’s drive southwest of Vienna near the Hungarian border, and found a makeshift bomb factory.
As well as explosives and sodium peroxide, investigators found cables, detonators, timers, knives, a machete and an air pistol along with €21,000 in counterfeit notes, a police siren and a phone containing instructions on bomb-building and propaganda from Islamic State (IS) terrorist organisation.
The 19-year-old man who lived there, an Austrian citizen with parents from North Macedonia, had been radicalised online, police said, then quit his job last month in a steel factory and told his colleagues as he left of his “big plans”.
Security officials revealed on Thursday how big: a suicide plot among the ticketless crowd that gathers outside all Swift concerts. Either on Thursday or Friday, police said, he planned to “kill himself and a large group of people near the stadium”.
“He was clearly radicalised and found it right to kill non-believers,” said Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, head of Austria’s Directorate of State Security and Intelligence (DSN).
Part of this “big plans” involved a 17-year-old friend and accomplice, also with North Macedonian roots and also radicalised by a known Islamist group. He was arrested on Wednesday afternoon in Vienna at the Ernst Happel stadium, the Swift concert venue, tucked in between the famous Prater gardens and the Danube. The teenager had worked at the stadium in the past, employed by a local facility management firm.
By Thursday morning, police said both teenagers had made “full and detailed confessions”. After questioning a 15-year-old friend of the pair, police said they were seeking no further accomplices.
Asked how close a call it had been, Austria’s ashen-faced interior minister Gerhard Karner said the situation had been – and remained – “serious”.
“What’s clear, though,” he added, “is that we were able to avoid a tragedy.”
While Swift has yet to comment on events, local promoter Barracuda Music has promised full refunds within 10 days – though many fans will be out of pocket for travel and accommodation.
It remains unclear if the promoter itself can expect an insurance payout for the three lost gigs. The firm insisted the decision to the cancel the concerts – in co-ordination with Swift’s management – was the right one.
Barracuda chief executive Ewald Tatar said: “I can only answer the question of whether the decision was necessary by looking at the facts and say: yes.”
Chancellor Karl Nehammer praised the promoter’s “responsible” decision and said he knew many fans were “very sad”.
“Thank God a tragedy was averted,” he added.
As the investigation continued, instead of their first concert evening, Swift fans gathered in central Vienna’s St Stephen’s Square. As evening came they swapped arm bands and sang favourite Swift songs on street corners.
Back in the cool of the Lutheran city church, instead of writing her Sunday sermon, Julia Schnizlein sat and listened to visitors’ stories. The reminded her, she said, of her motto as pastor, from Romans: be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
“The church guestbook is filled with positive comments of people just grateful that they are alive,” she said. “Amid the frustration, there is a huge ability among these Swifties to turn this into something positive.”