AARAU. The cartridges left behind at the Schachen racetrack are becoming the investigation’s loudest witnesses. Aargau police have confirmed that forensic teams recovered casings of two calibres after Sunday’s shooting: 9 millimetre rounds of the kind used in pistols and submachine guns, and 5.45 by 39 millimetre rounds, the standard ammunition of the AK-74 assault rifle.
The identification, first reported by the Tages-Anzeiger and later outlined by operations leader Matthias Schildknecht, answers one question and raises several harder ones. The AK-74 is the lighter, newer sibling of the Kalashnikov AK-47. It is standard issue in several armies and, according to specialists, widespread in organised crime, valued because it rarely jams and costs less than comparable western rifles. Italian investigators have repeatedly documented the type in mafia hands.
More unsettling is the geometry. According to information from the crime scene, the first shots may have been fired from a distance of up to 300 metres onto the festival grounds, a detail consistent with the use of a rifle and with witness accounts of shots that seemed to arrive from nowhere after the music stopped at 2.30am.
Police commander Michael Leupold has given the case its bleakest formulation so far. The dead woman, 22 year old Maria Spinelli, and the five injured, four men and a woman aged 24 to 27, did not know one another. “We assume they are random victims,” Leupold said. If that assessment holds, the attack was not a settling of scores but an act aimed at whoever happened to be there.
Early witness statements spoke of two attackers, and the two calibres kept that possibility alive through Sunday. Police have since called the two shooter reports unconfirmed and say they currently assume a single perpetrator: the 43 year old Swiss man arrested shortly before 1am on Monday on strong suspicion.
What investigators will not yet say is how they found him, whether weapons were seized, or what the suspect has told them. The canton has called a media conference for Wednesday at 2pm at the Mobile Polizei base in neighbouring Schafisheim, and has said no further information will be released before then.
The silence has a procedural logic. Under cantonal practice the suspect is now being questioned by prosecutors, who must bring him before a detention judge within days if they want him held. Anything said publicly before the first interrogation risks contaminating testimony, and anything said about the weapon risks alerting whoever supplied it.
That supplier is now a line of inquiry in its own right. An assault rifle in 5.45 by 39 is not a weapon a Swiss sport shooter picks up at a club. Tracing its path, whether from army stocks, from the legal collectors’ market with serial numbers filed away, or from the Balkan and eastern European channels that feed western Europe’s illegal gun trade, will run through registries in several cantons and, almost certainly, through foreign police forces.
While the forensic work continues, the town has begun the quieter rituals. Flowers and candles appeared at the cordon around the racetrack on Monday evening, and the organisers of the Aarauer Rave, which had drawn around 3,500 people, have cancelled their remaining events. A 34 year old witness told reporters he heard the shots the moment the music ended and first took them for fireworks; another described how the young woman who died had tried to shelter behind a refrigerator unit.
Italy is following the file closely. Two of the five wounded are Italian citizens, and Rome’s foreign ministry has sent officials to Zurich. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who named Maria Spinelli on Sunday evening, has said she expects full clarification from the Swiss authorities.
Wednesday’s conference in Schafisheim now carries the weight of the case. Three questions wait for it: what motive, if any, the suspect has offered; where the rifle came from; and how a 43 year old man came to open the final hour of a summer party with two weapons and no known connection to anyone he hit.