Mystery over disco grenade attack

The disco is frequented by young Serbian and Croatian immigrants.

LINZ, Austria (CNN) -- Mystery surrounds a hand-grenade attack on a crowded nightclub in Austria that wounded 27 people after police failed to unearth any major leads.

Police in the city of Linz said on Sunday that nobody in the club, popular with teenage Balkan immigrants, had reported seeing who had rolled the grenade onto the dance floor in the early hours of Saturday.

Around 50 teenagers were in the club at the time of the blast.

"We've pretty much finished doing interviews, but we basically have no useful leads. Nobody saw anything, nobody noticed anyone acting suspiciously," a police spokesman told Reuters news agency.

The grenade exploded near the DJ stand at the X-Large club on the outskirts of Linz, 180 km (110 miles) west of Vienna near the German and Czech borders.

EXTRA INFORMATION Map: Linz, Austria

Police spokesman Michael Tischlinger said eyewitnesses had reported seeing "a flash on the dance floor followed by a terrible explosion."

The grenade, which sent thousands of small metal ball-bearings ripping through the dancers like bullets, was of a type designed to injure rather than kill and was used by military forces in former Yugoslavia, although not in Austria, government explosives experts said.

The pellets broke through the skin of dozens of club-goers, lodged in bones and in a few cases hit or lodged near internal organs, prompting doctors to operate on the four most severely wounded young people from the disco.

Remains of the hand grenade were found in the blast wreckage inside the discotheque which is located in a largely empty office block on the edge of Linz, in a part of the city known locally as "Little Munich."

Tischlinger added that hand grenades are relatively easy to obtain in Western Europe and that gangs have used them as weapons in the past.

Robert Akalovic was one of the 27 victims

Eleven of the 27 injured in the blast were still being treated in hospital on Sunday. None of them were in critical condition.

Police said there was no history of gang troubles at the club, which is popular with children of immigrant families from former Yugoslav republics, or of fighting among its young visitors, who were mostly aged between 15 and 19.

Martin Fischemeister, the surgeon in charge at the Unfall hospital in Linz, said 10 young men had been brought to the hospital and three had been treated in intensive care with body wounds.

"All of our patients are in stable condition and I would not describe any of their injuries as life-threatening," he said.