Three Muslim men have been widely praised for helping a police officer and an elderly woman during Monday’s gun attack in Vienna.
A video showing Mikail Ozen, Recep Gultekin, and Osama Joda intervening to aid wounded people, including a policeman has gone viral on social media, a BBC report said.
Both Ozen and Gultekin are Austrian citizens from Turkish origins, while Joda is Palestinian.
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At the attack occurred, Gultekin was shot in the leg while aiding the woman with his friend Özen. They also carried an injured police officer to safety after Joda gave him first aid.
“We couldn’t act as if we hadn’t seen him,” Ozen said. “We ran and carried him to the ambulance” by supporting him under his shoulders as the gunfire continued.
Joda, 23, was working at a nearby McDonalds when the attacker opened fire on passers-by. One of the police officers who arrived at the scene was also shot.
“I pulled him behind the concrete bench and tried to stop the bleeding,” Joda told local newspaper Kurier. “There was blood everywhere.”
The assailant killed four people before being shot dead by police.
Condemning Attack
Meanwhile, Egypt’s Al-Azhar institution has condemned Monday’s terrorist attack near a synagogue in the Austrian capital Vienna.
Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, said in a statement that “killing one soul is as if killing all of humanity and the human right to life is one of the highest purposes in all laws.”
What the young men 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, also 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.