Originally published 2020-11-07.
On the night of 2 November 2020, as a gunman moved through the centre of Vienna shooting at people in bars and on the street, two young men from the city's Turkish community ran towards the wounded instead of away from them. Mikail Özen, a 25-year-old mixed martial arts fighter and personal trainer, and his friend Recep Tayyip Gültekin, 21, helped an elderly woman to safety and then carried a badly injured police officer to an ambulance while shots were still being fired. Both men were later honoured for their courage, and their story became one of the few hopeful threads in one of the darkest evenings in modern Austrian history.
What happened in Vienna on 2 November 2020
The attack began just before 8 pm in the Innere Stadt, Vienna's historic first district, around Seitenstettengasse and the streets near St. Rupert's Church. The area was busier than usual for a Monday: a national coronavirus lockdown with a night-time curfew was due to start at midnight, and many people had gone out for a last drink or meal before bars and restaurants closed.
The shooting lasted roughly nine minutes. Police officers shot the attacker dead in the courtyard by St. Rupert's Church at 20:08. In that short time four people were killed: two Austrian men aged 21 and 39, an Austrian woman aged 44 and a 24-year-old German woman. Twenty-three others were injured, seven of them critically, among them a 28-year-old police officer. Some early reports, including the first version of this story, gave the death toll as five; that figure included the gunman himself.
The attacker was Kujtim Fejzulai, a 20-year-old with Austrian and North Macedonian citizenship. He carried an assault rifle, a pistol and a machete, and wore a fake explosive belt. The so-called Islamic State (ISIL) claimed the attack the next day and released a video of him pledging allegiance to the group, though investigators said it was not clear whether it had helped to plan it.
How Mikail Özen and Recep Gültekin helped
The two friends were in the city centre when the first shots rang out. Accounts given to Austrian and Turkish media describe a confused, frightening scene in which it was impossible to tell how many attackers there were or where the next shots would come from.
According to the Turkish news site Duvar, which summarised the men's own account, Gültekin first carried a wounded woman into a nearby restaurant and helped an elderly woman reach a safe spot. At one point the gunman turned his weapon towards him, and he threw himself to the ground. He was hurt in the leg; some early reports said he had been shot through the calf, while others described the injury as light. Either way, he was expected to recover fully.
The pair then came across a police officer who had been shot and was lying in the street. Ignoring officers who urged them to stay back, they lifted him and carried him to an ambulance. The officer survived. Özen was later quoted by the German tabloid Bild as saying, "We didn't think about the dangers. We just had to do something."
A third man, Osama Abu El-Hosna, a 23-year-old Palestinian who managed a McDonald's restaurant near Schwedenplatz, also stayed with the injured officer, pressing on his wound and using his own jumper to slow the bleeding until paramedics arrived. Al Jazeera reported that police later gave him a police patch in thanks, which he said he would keep for the rest of his life.
How they were honoured
Recognition came from several directions. Vienna's mayor, Michael Ludwig, publicly thanked the men for their courage, and Özen later told the Turkish daily Daily Sabah that the mayor and the Vienna police had given them medals of honour and bravery. Austria's then interior minister, Karl Nehammer, acknowledged that two Austrians with a migrant background had brought the wounded officer to safety.
In Turkey, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu called them "two heroes" on social media, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also praised them. Turkish-language reports at the time said a certificate of bravery was handed to them through the Turkish embassy in Vienna. A year after the attack, on 3 November 2021, the two men visited the embassy and met Ambassador Ozan Ceyhun, who said the community should not forget what they had done.
Not everything about the attention was positive. Some social media users later accused the pair of sympathising with a Turkish nationalist movement. Their representative denied this, and both men said they had no political involvement. Whatever people thought of their views, no one disputed what they did that night.
Who the attacker was and what went wrong
Fejzulai was already known to the authorities. In April 2019 he had been sentenced to 22 months in prison for trying to travel through Turkey to Syria to join ISIL. He was released on parole in December 2019, after serving about eight months, and was enrolled in a deradicalisation programme.
Investigations after the attack found serious gaps. Slovak police had reported to Austria that he and another man had tried to buy ammunition in Bratislava in the summer of 2020, but the warning was not acted on in time. Austria's domestic intelligence office was strongly criticised, an independent commission was set up to review its handling of the case, and the agency was later restructured.
On 3 November police searched addresses linked to the attacker and found ammunition at his home. Synagogues and Jewish institutions in Vienna closed for the day as a precaution, and on 6 November the authorities closed two mosques they said had contributed to his radicalisation.
Why the bystanders' story mattered
The attack came days after deadly Islamist attacks in France, and there were fears it would deepen suspicion of Muslims across Europe. The fact that some of the first people to help victims were young Muslim men, two of Turkish heritage and one Palestinian, was widely noted in Austria and abroad. Their actions were a reminder that the dividing line in such attacks runs between people who want to kill and people who want to save lives, not between religions or communities.
Austrian leaders made the same point. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the fight was not between Christians and Muslims or between Austrians and migrants, but between the many who believe in peace and the few who want war.
What to do if you are caught up in an attack
Most people will never face anything like this, but emergency services across Europe give the same simple advice, often summarised as run, hide, tell:
- Run if there is a safe route away from the danger, and leave belongings behind.
- Hide if you cannot get away: lock or barricade yourself in, silence your phone and stay away from doors and windows.
- Tell the police as soon as it is safe, with as much detail as you can about location and attackers.
- Follow police instructions, keep your hands visible when officers arrive, and do not post videos online during an incident; Vienna police asked people to send footage to them instead.
Helping the wounded, as Özen and Gültekin did, is a personal choice made in seconds. Basic first-aid training, especially in stopping heavy bleeding, makes that choice far more effective. Many Red Cross organisations run short courses that teach exactly this.
Remembering the victims
Four people lost their lives in Vienna that evening, and many more were left with physical and psychological injuries. Memorials of candles and flowers grew along the streets where the attack happened, and the city has marked the anniversary each year since. The bravery of the men who helped does not lessen that loss, but it is part of how the city remembers the night: not only for the violence of one man, but for the strangers who ran to help.
Sources: Wikipedia: 2020 Vienna attack; Al Jazeera: Vienna attack, the Muslim heroes who saved lives; Duvar English: Turkish government praises "two heroes"; Daily Sabah: Turkish heroes recall last year's Vienna terrorist attack. Özen's quote was first published by Bild.
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