National Post (National Edition)
Truck driver ‘was trying to hit people’
Four killed in attack on Swedish store
IT WAS TERRIBLE. IT HIT A PRAM WITH A KID IN IT — DEMOLISHED IT.
‘ACT OF TERROR’
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 Stockholm police told a news conference late Friday the man was “in the vicinity” of the truck crash and that he was arrested in Marsta, a northern suburb close to the city’s international airport, Arlanda.
He says 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.”
Evensson of the police force discouraged people from going into central Stockholm on Friday night, and the national theatre, which is near the crash site, cancelled three plays.
It is not the first time the Swedish capital has been hit by a terror.
In 2010, it became the first Nordic country to be subjected to an attack linked to Islamic extremism, but the two bombs in the capital killed only the bomber, Iraqiborn Taimour Abdulwahab, who was radicalized in Luton, England.
After that, a plot inspired by ISIL to make pressure bombs was disrupted by police, and last year, a teaching assistant and a boy in a school in an immigrant area were killed in a racially motivated sword attack.
Integration has remained a problem in the country, where relatively high numbers of immigrants in a population of just under 10 million means it has one of the highest rates in Europe.
The numbers have been rising steadily since the 1990s, and in 2015 Sweden accepted a record number of more than 160,000 refugees.
Violent crime has decreased from a peak in 2011, but the number of killings has risen, with a record 112 cases of lethal violence in 2015, and 33 shot dead, compared with 17 in 2011.
The government has confirmed that “the number of reported rapes in Sweden has risen,” but says this is largely due to changes in the way it is reported.
In February last year, police identified 53 residential areas around the country that have become “increasingly marred by crime, social unrest and insecurity.”
While the government denies that these are “no-go zones,” in denying Trump’s claims it admitted that police “have experienced difficulties fulfilling their duties.”
But studies by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention have found most of those suspected of crimes were born in Sweden to two Swedish-born parents, but people from foreign backgrounds are 2.5 times more likely to be suspected of crimes.
The country also has some of the biggest differences in Europe in employment rates and poverty levels between the native-born population and those born abroad.
Despite the difficulties, the government maintains that low birth rates mean that they need immigrants as they point out that they still have a strong economy and a public finance surplus.