The 2015 Graz Attack

Minutes of violence in central Graz

On June 20, 2015, a man drove an SUV through streets in central Graz at high speed, deliberately striking people in public areas. Austrian reporting and the later court record established that three people were killed, including a child, while many others were injured or placed in immediate danger.

The attack crossed several parts of the city center. At one point, the driver left the vehicle and attacked two people with a knife before continuing. The episode ended when he went to a police station and was taken into custody. The violence lasted only minutes, but its geographic spread and the number of people exposed made the investigation unusually large.

Investigation and the scale of the charges

Police and prosecutors reconstructed the route, collected surveillance material and witness accounts, and examined the driver's actions person by person. That reconstruction mattered because the criminal case was not limited to the three deaths. People who were deliberately driven at, forced to jump away or otherwise placed in lethal danger were also treated as alleged victims of attempted murder.

By the 2016 trial, the proceedings covered 113 alleged acts. ORF's court reporting described charges or findings involving three murders and 108 attempted murders, including attempts involving children. The numbers reflect the legal analysis of individual acts during the route, not a claim that every person suffered the same degree of physical injury.

The central legal issue: criminal responsibility

There was little dispute at trial over who had driven the vehicle. The difficult question was whether the defendant could be held criminally responsible for his conduct at the time. Psychiatric assessments did not reach a single conclusion.

Two experts had assessed him as not criminally responsible because of severe psychiatric disturbance, while another considered him responsible. The prosecution initially sought placement in a secure institution based on the psychiatric evidence. Ultimately, the jury had to decide whether the legal threshold for incapacity was met.

After hearing expert testimony and other evidence, the eight jurors unanimously concluded that Rizvanovic was criminally responsible. That finding allowed the court to convict him rather than treating the case solely as a non-punitive institutional placement proceeding.

Conviction and sentence

On September 29, 2016, the Graz court convicted the defendant of three murders and the large group of attempted murders addressed in the indictment. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The court also ordered placement in an institution for offenders requiring psychiatric treatment because of dangerousness.

The defense challenged the outcome. In 2017, Austria's Supreme Court rejected the nullity complaint concerning criminal responsibility, and the Vienna Higher Regional Court left the life sentence in place. ORF reported that the appellate result confirmed both the finding that he was legally responsible and the punishment imposed by the trial court.

Timeline

Victims and public remembrance

The criminal record's large number of attempted-murder counts can obscure the human scale of what happened. Three people lost their lives that day, and many others required medical treatment or escaped only by moving out of the vehicle's path. Graz held memorial events in the aftermath and again on anniversaries of the attack.

Reporting from the city and ORF has continued to frame the event through remembrance of those killed and injured, as well as the emergency response. That approach is important in a case whose offender and courtroom questions received intense attention: the crime's lasting significance belongs first to the people harmed and the community that experienced it.

Current status

The criminal case is resolved. The trial judgment imposed life imprisonment, and subsequent appellate proceedings upheld the core outcome. In September 2023, ORF reported that the convicted attacker, then held at Stein prison, had been found dead in his cell. The conviction therefore remains the final adjudicated account of criminal responsibility for the 2015 attack.