Nazi Shooting on LGBTQ Bar May Not Have Been a ‘Lone Wolf’ Attack After All

A young Slovakian man loaded a handgun and made his way to an LGBTQ nightclub in downtown Bratislava in October 2022.

Upon reaching the Tepláreň bar, the 19-year-old shooter hid behind a wall. When he spotted patrons outside, he opened fire, killing two. He then fled the scene and, after posting to Twitter and 4Chan, took his own life later that night. In addition to a suicide note, he left behind a manifesto that specifically thanked an international group of neo-Nazi propagandists.

Even so, the gunman was long thought to be a classic “lone wolf” attacker. But new evidence suggests he didn’t act alone and his manifesto may have been written by multiple authors, according to a report released Wednesday by the Accelerationist Research Consortium and shared exclusively with VICE News. 

“It was a bit of a shocker when I first realized that there could be a potential second, unknown author because I had never come across this before when analyzing a targeted violence manifesto,” Julia Kupper, one of the authors, told VICE News.

Specifically, linguists and extremism researchers with the group found evidence that online figures active in Terrorgram, a hate-filled neo-Nazi propaganda group, may have aided the Bratislava shooter. Terrorgram is an online collective of neo-Nazi channels and accounts on Telegram, a platform loved by the far-right for its  lax moderation, that promote neo-Nazi accelerationism, which is the idea of hastening the fall of society so they can build a white ethnostate. 

A member of the collective, whose entire online presence was built around narrating neo-Nazi terror manifestos, was just outed as a gore-obsessed dildo saleswoman from California by a group of anti-fascist researchers. 

The Bratislava shooter has been referred to as “Telegram’s first saint” as he was the first to openly acknowledge the group’s influence before committing a terror attack. “Saint” is a term used in the community to refer to a neo-Nazi who spills blood for the cause.

Terrorgram is infamous for agitating for and celebrating neo-Nazi acts of terror. In his manifesto, the Bratislava shooter explicitly thanked the collective for “building the future of the White revolution, one publication at a time.” Following the murders, the collective has celebrated the shooter and his work, primarily a 65-page document that calls for more violence. 

Terrogram, however, may have had a hand in creating that work. 

The report says the manifesto was “more consistent with the author profile of a native English speaker, who is possibly older, well educated, and from the United States”—a far cry from a teenage native Slovak speaker who had never lived anywhere else.

Along with Kupper, Kacper Rękawek and Matthew Kriner wrote the report, which came about when Kupper, a forensic linguist, first began analyzing the shooter’s manifesto, his suicide note, tweets, and post-shooting writings on 4Chan. 

"When I read through the manifesto for the first time, I immediately noticed that something was off," she told VICE News. "The language of the manifesto was too articulate for this specific text type. I've read about 100 manifestos over the years and have studied a lot of them, so I'm familiar with the level of language you would expect from these types of communications.

For example, the language in the manifesto was incredibly high level for a non-native English speaker and starkly different in both tone and syntax from the suicide note. The document also uses both European and American styles of dates which almost never happens. The Bratislava shooter had a fixation on the zeitgeist of the American far-right like the anti-LGBTQ sentiments, and used American slang and abbreviations that a European wouldn’t. 

The possibility of a co-author changes the entirety of the Bratislava shooter's story and suggests the shooter was “potentially groomed or guided along his mobilization to violence,” reads the report. 

Multiple factors led the authors of the report to the idea a possible coauthor may be tied to Terrorgram, including the shooter mentioning the collective in the manifesto and on 4Chan after the shooting, how quickly the group embraced his crime, and his adoption of “saint culture.”

“If that second author also holds a connection to Terrorgram as suspected, it would suggest that the Terrorgram community is taking on a semblance of a command-and-control functionality,” it adds. 

Manifestos, like the one the Bratislava shooter put out, are not just benign pieces of writing. They’re meant to radicalize their readers and push people toward violence, and, in many cases, they’ve been effective. Numerous neo-Nazi murderers, for example, have cited the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto as an inspiration. 

The Bratislava shooter explicitly stated he hoped his manifesto would provide similar inspiration. 

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

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