X-Large DiscoGrenade Blast
A hand grenade exploded inside the X-Large Disco in Linz, Austria, injuring multiple people in a venue reported as popular with young immigrants from the former Yugoslavia and Balkans.
Incident Overview
What Happened
Contemporary reporting places the blast in the early hours of Saturday 27 July 2002, around 3:15–3:20 a.m. local time.
A hand grenade exploded inside the X-Large Disco in Linz. Reports described the venue as popular with young immigrants from the former Yugoslavia or Balkans.
The incident was widely treated as a likely deliberate attack, but the reviewed sources did not verify a confirmed motive or named perpetrator.
Location
X-Large Disco, Linz
Venue: X-Large Disco / X-Large club.
Area: Linz, Upper Austria, Austria. A later retrospective identifies the venue as being on Eduard-Süß-Straße, but the exact street number was not verified.
Context: Some contemporary reports described the club as being in a western part of the city known locally as “Little Munich”; another described it as being in a largely empty office building on the edge of Linz.
Check Conflicts →Key Facts
Reported Impact
Chronology
Incident Timeline
Operational Themes
Why It Matters
Disputed Details
Conflicting Information
The source set is broadly consistent on the main event, but several details vary across reports.
The 27-injured figure is repeated most often, but not every report uses it.
Reports 27 injured.
Reports “up to 20” injured.
The 27 figure appears across multiple contemporary reports and in the 2022 retrospective.
Reports differ on whether injuries were serious, critical, or life-threatening.
States none was in critical condition, while four underwent emergency surgery.
Describe serious injuries; Kurier later says two victims were in life-threatening condition.
This may reflect changing medical status, different terminology, or reporting stage.
Sources vary on how strongly police had publicly described the blast as deliberate.
Says police believed someone deliberately detonated the grenade.
Says police would not say whether they believed the blast was intentional.
The attack framing is strong, but the exact contemporary police position is not fully consistent across reports.
Some reports say Linz is about 100 miles west of Vienna; others say about 200 km west of Vienna.
Appears in several English-language reports.
Appears in other reports.
This is an approximation issue rather than a meaningful factual dispute.
Not Verified
Unverified Details
These points were not confirmed by the reviewed source set.
Source Material
References
The cards below list the news, commentary, retrospective and aggregator sources identified in the incident file.
All Document URLs
Source Links
Direct links to the sources used for this incident page.
