A handout picture provided by the Police Department of Lower Austria of weapons secured by police after the hostage-taking and shooting in Grosspriel.
DPA/Vienna
Austrian police said yesterday that they found the charred body of a gunman in a cellar at his farmhouse in a central village, ending a stand-off that left four other people dead and involved 300 policemen.
Police said the suspected 55-year-old poacher, who apparently set himself on fire, may have committed more crimes, but said there was no indication that he had killed more people.
“After I had a first look, one can assume that the number of weapons hidden in this house was in the triple digits, possibly pointing to other crimes,” anti-terrorism police commander Walter Weninger told broadcaster ORF.
He had killed three police officers and an ambulance driver on Tuesday after he drove through a roadblock to avoid being detained in a forest for illegally hunting deer.
Investigators initially assumed that one of the officers had been kidnapped and shot later.
But Weninger said he was killed when the gunman hijacked his police car and drove to Grosspriel, a village in the Alpine foothills, 80km south-west of Vienna.
During the shootout and the standoff that involved armoured vehicles and helicopters, the gunman always aimed at the heads and chests of police officers, Weninger said. Police are trying to determine whether the gunman was behind a knife attack on another hunter in 2011.
“There are massive indications that it was him,” prosecution spokeswoman Michaela Schnell said about Alois H, as the gunman was identified under Austrian privacy rules.
She added that a DNA test would give the final confirmation that the burned body was indeed Alois H, even though investigators said they were confident that this was the case.
The man, who was in the timber business, apparently led a double life as a licensed hunter and a poacher, according to a friend who talked to him on the phone during the stand-off.
“A few weeks ago, he started saying that he was having problems and that there was a second side to his personality,” the friend, Herbert Huthansl, told the Kurier newspaper.
In the phone call, H admitted that he was the poacher who had killed eight male deer in the area in the past years. The animals had been found headless, likely because H wanted to keep only the heads as trophies.
The interior ministry also launched an internal investigation into why an operation to catch a poacher had ended with the death of five people.