the chilling backstory of the foiled attack –

Taylor Swift, the pop star who has boosted the economy with her in-demand concerts, has had her Vienna dates canceled due to the discovery of a plot to plan a terrorist act. “The reason for these cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear and a huge sense of guilt, because so many people had planned to come to those shows. But I was also very grateful to the authorities, because thanks to them, we were mourning concerts and not lives,” the artist said. Now the CIA, the main US intelligence agency for foreign affairs that helped foil the terrorist attack by the self-styled Islamic State, has released new, chilling information.

The attack, it is learned, could have caused the death of “tens of thousands” of fans. The revelation was made by the deputy director of the CIA, David Cohen, speaking at an Intelligence & National Security Summit in Maryland. During the meeting, Cohen declared that the agency had provided Austrian authorities with essential information on four people who were linked to the Islamic State and who were planning to carry out a massacre at the pop star’s show. “They were planning to kill a huge number of people at this concert, tens of thousands of people, I’m sure many Americans,” Cohen said, quoted by the New York Times.

The deputy director of the CIA added that some of the individuals arrested were found with bomb-making materials and had direct access to the location of three shows of the Eras ​​Tour. The shows, which were scheduled to feature 200,000 people from August 8 to 10 at the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna, were canceled after the arrests. On August 7, Austrian authorities arrested three people accused of planning a terrorist attack, including 19-year-old extremist suspect Beran A., who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and was radicalized by preacher Abul Baraa in Berlin, according to German intelligence sources. The other suspects arrested are a 17-year-old Austrian and an 18-year-old Iraqi, but their names have not yet been released.