Swerving truck was ‘trying to hit people’
Man arrested in suspected terror attack
STOCKHOLM • Just over six weeks ago, Donald Trump was mocked around the world for suggesting that Sweden had been the victim of a terror atrocity.
The U.S. president linked high levels of immigration with the attack — which turned out to be fictitious — and rising levels of crime in the country, later saying he had based the comments on a Fox News report.
He was ridiculed, with Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, asking: “What has he been smoking?” And the country’s U.S. embassy appeared to mock him on Twitter.
But an attack Friday has shown that tensions are reaching breaking point. A suspected terrorist driving a stolen beer truck killed four people and wounded 15 others, nine of them seriously, as he tore through pedestrians and then rammed the truck into a department store in downtown Stockholm.
Baby carriages were sent “flying through the air,” one broadcaster reported, as the vehicle zigzagged along the pedestrianized Queen Street shopping district.
“It swerved from side to side. It didn’t look out of control, it was trying to hit people,” Glen Foran, an Australian tourist, told Reuters. “It hit people, it was terrible. It hit a pram with a kid in it, demolished it.”
Annevi Petersson, a photographer, had just stepped into a change room in one of the shops on the street when she heard the truck thunder past and dashed out to see what had happened.
“I heard the noise, I heard the screams, I saw the people,” she said. “Just outside the store there was a dead dog, the owner screaming. There was a lady lying with a severed foot. There was blood everywhere.
“There were bodies on the ground everywhere, and a sense of panic, people standing by their loved ones, but also people running away.”
Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said “the country is in a state of shock,” adding that “the aim of terrorism is to undermine democracy. But such a goal will never be achieved in Sweden.”
Police arrested one suspect “whom we are particularly interested in” but would not say if they are hunting for any others.
Jan Evensson of the Stockholm police told a news conference Friday the man was “in the vicinity” of the truck crash and that he was arrested in Marsta, a suburb near the city’s international airport, Arlanda. He said the suspect was spotted by a police patrol and was in a police photo released earlier Friday wearing a greenish hood at the top of an escalator.
National police spokesman Stefan Hector said “we have a working hypothesis this is an act of terror.”