Austria: Cop killer who said they’d never get him

A hunter who killed three policemen and paramedic in a forest outside Vienna before killing himself was one of the biggest illegal poachers of animals in the country, it has emerged.

The hoard of guns  many of them stolen from other hunters huts  found in Hubers farmhouse. Picture: AP

Not only did Alois Huber poach game illegally in the middle of the night, he violated one of Austrian hunting’s most sacred rules – kill for meat, not just the trophy of the wild animal’s head.

Huber shot countless deer in the forests outside Vienna, sawed off their antlered heads to mount at home – and left their decapitated bodies to rot in the undergrowth … until this week.

Police had received word of Huber’s nocturnal poaching and went to confront him in the early hours of Tuesday.

Enraged, Huber embarked on a shooting rampage that left three officers and a paramedic dead. Then he set his farmhouse bunker full of trophies on fire, and killed himself with a shot to the head in the early hours of the next morning.

It was one of the worst multiple killings in Austria’s post-war history.

Villagers are baffled by the shocking violence – and say Huber led a double life. They yesterday described the lorry driver as an upstanding neighbour, a welcome guest at birthday parties who gladly helped out when asked for a favour.

“He was a quiet, pleasant person who never did anyone any harm,” said Adelheid Wieder, just hours after Huber’s charred body was found. “Nobody imagined that he could be so without scruples and so aggressive.”

But Huber had good reason to keep his passion a secret – poaching is severely punished in Austria, where it can mean up to three years in prison.

Hunters are licensed only after passing exams that test their knowledge of weapons, ballistics, hunting traditions, different kinds of game and their diseases – and a host of other disciplines.

Police followed up on more than 300 reported illegal hunting reports last year.

Interior ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundboeck said yesterday that police moved in on Huber after monitoring phone calls in which he acknowledged being the illegal trophy hunter being sought in the vicinity of Annaberg, about 50 miles south-west of Vienna.

Additionally, said Mr Grundboeck, a search of his farm on the outskirts of the village of Grosspriel turned up hundreds of deer antlers and other game trophies – and about 100 guns, “many taken from other hunters’ huts”.

State prosecutor Michaela Schnell said Huber is suspected in the illegal killing of numerous stags since 2005 and is also thought to have been the masked man who attacked a hunter with a knife two years ago, in what investigators now consider attempted murder. In past centuries, poachers in Austria were often seen as cunning Robin Hood-like figures outwitting the noble owners of lands that they illegally hunted on for food. Now, says expert Roland Girtler, some “drive in the night with 4x4s in the forest, blind the game so that it stands still and then shoot. That is pathetic.”

No one in Grosspriel or the cluster of surrounding hamlets about 40 miles west of Vienna suggests that Huber used such methods.

They describe the 55-year-old as an expert who hunted legally and whose hobby turned into an obsession after his wife died about 15 years ago, leaving the childless widower with no close family.

Those willing to talk about him after his rampage still do not believe that he was the man leaving the headless carcases of deer in his wake.

“We often went hunting for rabbits and pheasant,” said innkeeper Martin Jaeger. “There was never any talk of poaching.”

Psychiatrist Reinhard Haller said Huber’s rampage could have been linked in part to a romantic view of himself as a poacher of old on the run from repressive authorities.

From the start of his illicit hunts to his stand-off with police, it was a “struggle to see who is better,” Dr Haller said, describing Huber’s suicide as “an expression of his determination not to accept defeat”.

Some of Huber’s last words as police closed in support that image of a defiant outlaw proud of his illegal shoots.

“I am the poacher of Annaberg,” he told his friend, Herbert Huthansl, by mobile phone.

“They’re not going to get me.”