"He was playing with his ideas", the 19-year-old's lawyer defends her client: He would not have attacked Taylor Swift's concert, the bomb would not have worked

The lawyer for the main suspect in a failed plot to attack a concert by world star Taylor Swift in Vienna tried on Sunday to downplay the seriousness of the plan, saying her client was only "playing with ideas". Austrian authorities said earlier this week that the suspect is originally from North Macedonia and asked Skopje for information about him.

Swift's three scheduled concerts this week have been canceled after Austrian authorities revealed that a 19-year-old had been planning a suicide attack inspired by the Islamic State (IS) extremist group. The concerts were planned to be held in a football stadium with thousands of people. Austrian investigators said the young man had recently taken an oath to IS and made a full confession after police raided his home, where they found chemicals and equipment used by the attackers to carry out the bomb attack. Lawyer Ina-Christin Stiglitz told the Reuers news agency that the young man had contact with IS only last month.

Planned attack on Taylor Swift concerts arrests radicalized 17-year-old
"I'm interested," she said, suggesting her client had no real intention of committing a serious attack. "He only played with ideas", she said. "He says that the bomb was not of the right quality, it would not work." According to the lawyer, the suspect did online research on how to make a bomb. Among the three teenagers arrested by the Austrian police is a 17-year-old, whom Stiglitz said her client describes as "the neighbor and the best friend".

The neighbors of the 19-year-old, in the small town of Ternitz, expressed shock at his arrest, considering him a reserved but sociable child. They said that one of the signals that he may have been radicalized was that he recently grew a beard. The lawyer said that he grew his beard "to look stylish".