AUSTRIA: Austrian police say that a hand-grenade explosion in a disco in Linz was probably a deliberate attack.
Twenty-seven young people between the ages of 15 and 22 were injured after a grenade filled with lead pellets exploded on the dance-floor at the X-Large club, a disco frequented by Serbian and Croatian youths.
However police in the western Austrian city, the second-largest in the country, said yesterday that they still had no motive for the attack.
"It appears as if the grenade was thrown or rolled into the crowd by someone inside the discotheque, which indicates that it was a targeted attack," said police spokesman Mr Rudolf Keplinger.
Only about 40 people were in the disco when the grenade exploded at 3.20 a.m., he added.
Eleven of the injured were still in hospital yesterday afternoon with shrapnel injuries, four of whom underwent emergency surgery to remove lead pellets buried in their bones.
"I couldn't feel my back or my feet. My shirt was soaked with blood, more blood came out of my ears," said one victim on local radio.
Witnesses reported seeing a flash in the DJ area on the dance floor, followed by a large explosion. Eye-witnesses believed at first that a fitting had exploded.
"There was very little light inside the discotheque and nobody was able to see anything. There are as yet no witnesses or leads," Mr Keplinger said.
The Austrian Interior Ministry has dispatched a team to the scene in Linz, which is about 200 km west of Vienna.
The X-Large disco is located in a former factory hall in a run-down district on the western edge of the city and is frequented almost exclusively by people from the former Yugoslavia.
One military expert who has examined the grenade said it was a modern design commonly available on the eastern European black market. Much of the weaponry on the black market originates in the Balkans, left over from the wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.