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One of the terror suspects arrested in connection with a plan to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna this weekend was recently hired by a company that provides services to the venue where she was supposed to play.
Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, head of Austria's Directorate of State Security and Intelligence, said the 17-year-old suspect was scheduled to work at Ernst Happel Stadium during Swift's upcoming concerts.
Authorities also arrested a 19-year-old Austrian citizen and a 15-year-old Turkish citizen.
Franz Ruf, the public security director at Austria's Ministry of Interior, said that the 19-year-old was the mastermind of the terror plot, which he started working on last summer.
The suspect was radicalized online and had recently sworn an oath of allegiance to the current leader of the terror group ISIS. Haijawi-Pirchner said he admitted to crafting the plan with the other two suspects. He said they were going to use knives and homemade explosives to kill "as many people as possible" before killing himself.
After the suspects were arrested on Wednesday, officials said that Swift's three shows would go on as scheduled, but several hours later, it was decided that the safest course of action was to cancel the shows.
"The situation was serious, the situation is serious. But we can also say: A tragedy was prevented," Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said during a news conference. "Large concerts are often a target of Islamist attacks."