An Iraqi Muslim refugee has been praised as a hero for his heroic act, helping Vienna police arrest a man who attacked people indiscriminately in Brigittenau with a knife on the national holiday.
According to the Vienna SPÖ councilor Omar Al-Rawi, the 36-year-old Iraqi Mustafa Aldoree showed a rare courage when he saw a man attacking passers-by and injuring four of them with a knife he carried, Chronik newspaper reported.
Helping police, Aldoree managed to attack the man from the back, pulling him to the ground so that policemen could arrest him.
Austrian police say that assailant, a 35-year-old Austrian, was mentally ill, ruling out political or religious reasons.
The news became public after a video showing Aldoree’s act of bravery was widely shared on social media. However, Al-Rawi removed the video based on a request from the police for security reasons.
Aldoree is a 36-year-old father-of-two who came to Vienna as a refugee in 2015.
Of Austria’s 8.75 million people, an estimated 700,000 people identify as Muslims.
What Aldoree did falls in line with similar heroic acts done by some other Muslims.
A young Muslim teenager from Brooklyn helped police arrest a man who attacked an Orthodox Jewish woman on the subway in December last year.
Another young American Muslim student showed bravery, in December 2019, as she opened the doors of her mosque as a shelter, enabling more than 100 students to flee a high school stabbing in Wisconsin.