Swedish school attack racially motivated: police
Masked man wielding sword, knife carefully selected victims before being shot and killed
TROLLHATTAN, SWEDEN— It was a racially motivated, carefully planned rampage, police say. The 21-year-old masked man marched through a Swedish school with a sword and a knife, methodically selecting his victims. Within minutes, two people were stabbed to death and two others seriously wounded before the attacker was fatally shot by police.
Swedish police on Friday labelled the stabbing attack in Trollhattan a hate crime based on discoveries they made when searching the man’s home, the way he dressed, his behaviour at the scene and the way he selected his victims.
The southern industrial town has a large immigrant population among its 56,000 people and most of the students at the Kronan school, where the attack took place, are foreign-born.
“All together, this gives a picture that the perpetrator had a racist motive when he committed the crimes at Kronan school,” Trollhattan police said in a statement. “His way of marching points to Nazism.”
Police have not identified the attacker, a local man who died in the hospital of his gunshot wound Thursday afternoon.
Senior police officer Niclas Hallgren told a news conference Friday that surveillance videos showed him roaming with a sword and a sharp knife Thursday morning inside the school.
On the video, police noticed how he “selects his victims,” investigator Thord Haraldsson told reporters. “The victims were dark-skinned.”
Evidence appears to show that he acted alone, Haraldsson said, adding that police found “a kind of suicide note” in his apartment after the stabbings. In it, the attacker “tells us by that letter that he considers this his final act,” Hallgren said.
The sword’s holster was found inside a car parked near the school, Haraldsson said.
None of the victims have been identified by authorities. However, local newspaper GT cited relatives as saying the victims were 20-year-old Lavin Eskandar, a mentor at the school, and Ahmed Hassan, a 15-year-old student. Both died of their stabbing wounds Thursday.
The attack stunned Sweden, where violent crime is relatively rare due to strict gun-control laws, although there has been a spate of arson attacks on asylum centres in southern Sweden as an influx of refugees has surged. Immigration officials estimate some 190,000 asylum seekers will arrive this year, second only to Germany in Western Europe.
“This is a black day for Sweden,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said of the country’s deadliest school attack.
“This is a black day for Sweden. It is a tragedy that hits the entire country.” PRIME MINISTER STEFAN LOFVEN ON SWEDEN’S DEADLIEST SCHOOL ATTACK
“It is a tragedy that hits the entire country.”
A few hundred people held an antiracism protest Friday outside the school, whose roughly 400 pupils range from preschool to high school.
Surveillance videos authenticated by police show that the assailant posed for photos with some students before beginning his deadly rampage. Many students thought the attacker was playing a Halloween prank.
Police said the assailant had entered the school through a cafe in its lobby that is open to the public. He stabbed two victims, then knocked on two classroom doors and stabbed two more victims.
Panicked students fled the school as police and ambulances rushed in. Authorities found a dead male teacher and three people seriously wounded — two boys and another male teacher. All the wounded had surgery but one of the students later died.
The wounded student’s condition had improved Friday and he was considered stable, said Ulrika Jisland, a spokeswoman for the Norra Alvsborgs Lanssjukhus hospital. The 41-year-old teacher who was stabbed was in “serious but stable” condition, she said.
Sweden’s last school attack was in 1961, when a 17-year-old opened fire at a school dance in the southwest, wounding seven students, one of whom died later.