German Chancellor Angela Merkel is set to take part in a video conference with the leaders of France, Austria and top EU officials to discuss ways to combat Islamist terrorism.
Sources from Merkel’s Christian Democrats, CDU, told dpa on Monday.
French President, Emmanuel Macron, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel are all scheduled to participate in the video conference on Tuesday, the sources said.
The topic will then be discussed further at an EU interior ministers’ conference this Friday, and again at the next summit of EU leaders.
The talks with Kurz and Macron come in the wake of deadly attacks in France, Austria and Germany.
On Nov. 2, a man killed four people in a terrorist attack in central Vienna, before being shot and killed by police himself.
The attacker had been out on parole from a prison sentence that was handed down after he had tried to join Islamic State extremists in Syria.
France was rocked by suspected Islamist killings in October, including a knife attack in a church in Nice in which three people were killed, and the beheading in a Paris suburb of a schoolteacher who had used controversial cartoons of prophet Mohammed in a lesson on freedom of expression.
Prosecutors are also treating a stabbing in the eastern city of Dresden on Oct. 4, in which one man was killed as an Islamist extremist attack.
dpa/NAN
