Vienna terror attack: Scottish musician Callum Beattie describes night locked in bar basement during deadly Austrian shooting
Exclusive: Musician was caught up in the attack that has left five people dead and several injured
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Your support makes all the difference.Scottish musician Callum Beattie has described the “panic” he felt after being caught up in the Vienna shooting.
Five people have died and several more were injured after a gunman opened fire in the Austrian capital on Monday night (2 November).
One of the people killed is a suspected gunman shot dead by police, while an officer is among the wounded.
Beattie, a singer-songwriter who released his debut EP earlier this year, was at a bar in Vienna on the way to stay with his girlfriend, who is based in Budapest, when the attack took place.
He told The Independent of hearing “sirens everywhere” and helicopters hovering overhead, before early reports began to emerge on social media.
“I had about a dozen missed calls from my mum and dad, and links to news stories,” the 28-year-old said. “It took a while for it to circulate from there around the bar, there was a silence and a total feeling of disbelief.”
Beattie compared the noise of surrounding emergency services as like “nothing I’d ever experienced before” – “It sounded like a war had been started,” he said.
He added that there were around 14 people in the bar, and at one point he suggested that the manager lock the door and turn the lights off: “Then after a few minutes we were told to get into the basement.”
Beattie praised the others in the bar for remaining calm despite the tense situation they found themselves in.
“We only knew what we could find online,” he said. “One minute they were reporting multiple explosives, then saying they had been caught, and all the time I was back and forth with my manager – he was telling me what the UK news were reporting.”
He also revealed that he had been close to going back to the same Irish bar he’d been to the night before, which was just a few yards from where the first fatal shooting took place.
“My intention was to go there again, but for some reason I changed my mind at the last minute and walked to a different one,” he said. “Thank goodness I did.”
The attacks – which come on the eve of a “hard” national lockdown – were all in the vicinity of the city’s central synagogue near the Danube river, but it is not clear whether the place of worship was a target amid reports of shots being fired at those sitting outside the bars nearby.
People had been out making the most of its bars, restaurants and opera houses before the lockdown set in at midnight.
Beattie said the journey back to his hotel after the attack was like walking through “a ghost town” and “about the scariest journey I’ve ever had to make”.
Read the latest on the attack here.