FOUR DIE IN SWEDISH TERROR ATTACK NI TEACHER TELLS OF STOCKHOLM CARNAGE
A NORTHERN Ireland teacher has told of the “mass panic” he witnessed after a lorry smashed into a store in Stockholm yesterday, killing four people.
Enniskillen man Jonathan Lappin was in a coffee shop close to where the carnage occurred.
The science teacher said that when he first saw people running he thought a celebrity had turned up in the Swedish capital, but then realised something was badly wrong.
“People started to mass panic, and run into the coffee shop and crowd the back of it,” he said.
“There was a lot of confusion. Then the police arrived, and they were yelling loudly at people to evacuate.”
Dr Lappin stayed in the coffee shop for a few minutes before attempting to leave the scene.
He added that he could smell “the burning and the smoke” but did not fully understand what was happening — although he was pretty sure a terrorist attack was taking place.
“Myself and a colleague started to run down the street as fast as we could,” he told the BBC.
“There were riot police with shields up, helicopters, everything’s in lockdown. It’s such a spread out city, there’s a lot of confusion.”
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has said everything about the incident pointed to an act of terrorism. One person was arrested later in the day.
Apart from the four deaths, nine others were seriously injured after a terrorist used a lorry to plough through pedestrians in a busy shopping district at the heart of the Swedish capital.
Late last night the driver was said to be still at large.
Border control has been reinforced in response to the attack and the area where the lorry crashed remains sealed off, police said.
A spokeswoman for Stockholm County Council said: “We have 15 injured, adults and children who are being taken care of at hospi- Nine of them are seriously injured.”
At least one of the victims died after arriving at hospital, she added.
A police spokesman said: “The driver of the lorry, we have not made contact with him.”
The lorry ploughed into the corner of a department store and burst into flames.
Senior police officer Mats Lofving said: “We don’t know whether this incident is isolated or whether we can expect more. We have police positioned at several strategic places with a particular risk threat.”
Widespread condemnation poured in from across the globe as news of the attack broke, including from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who said he was “deeply concerned”.
President of the EU Commission Jean-Claude Juncker said: “An attack on any of our member states is an attack on us all.”
The incident comes after trucks were used in terror attacks in Nice and Berlin last year and just two weeks after Muslim convert Khalid Masood ploughed his car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge in London.
The Aftonbladet newspaper reported that the truck had been hijacked from the Swedish beermaker Spendrups earlier on Friday. The lorry smashed through stone lion bollards into the pedestrianised area, leaving a trail of blood and debris.
Witness Jan Granroth told Aftonbladet that “we stood inside a shoe store and heard something... and then people started to scream”.
He said: “I looked out of the store and saw a big truck.”
Another witness said: “When I came out, I saw a lorry standing there, with smoke coming from it and there were loads of bits of cars and broken flower pots along the street.”
Mikael Anttila, a 49-year-old portfolio manager at SEB bank, told the Press Association he saw several hundred people gathered on the street near the shop start to run “suddenly... like ants”.
“Then a lot of police started coming. Heavy weapons, civilian police, etcetera,” he said.
Annevi Peterson described people lying dead and injured in the street, with blood everywhere.
“I heard the noise, I heard the screams, I saw the people,” she told BBC News.
“There was, 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. There was a sense of panic, people standing by their loved ones, but also people running away.”
The crash is close to the scene of a terror attack in 2010 when Taimour Abdulwahab, a Swedish citizen who lived in Luton, blew himself up. The terrorist, who police concluded acted alone, died on December 11, 2010 in Bryggargatan. No one else was killed.
Abdulwahab rigged an Audi car with explosives in the hope that the blast would drive people to Drottninggatan, a busy shopping street, where he was waiting to set off two more devices.
We do not know whether this incident is isolated or whether we can expect more attacks