Truck rams people in Stockholm
A hijacked beer truck crashed into an upscale department store in central Stockholm yesterday, killing at least two people, according to Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, who called the crash a terror attack.
Live television footage showed smoke coming out of the upscale Ahlens department store on the city’s pedestrian street Drottninggatan, the store the truck smashed into about 3pm.
People in the downtown area fled in panic. Authorities evacuated the city’s nearby Central Station, which links regional trains with the Swedish capital’s subway system. All trains to and from the main station were halted and two large shopping malls in the capital were shut down.
“Sweden has been attacked,” Lofven said in a nationally televised press conference. “This indicates that it is an act of terror.”
Many were also injured in the incident and by the time of going to print estimates of the death count varied.
“We stood inside a shoe store and heard something... and then people started to scream,” witness Jan Granroth told the Aftonbladet daily. “I looked out of the store and saw a big truck.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack and police at a later news conference said no one had been arrested so far, contradicting earlier Swedish media reports that one person was in custody.
Swedish beer maker Spendrups said one of its trucks had been hijacked earlier yesterday.
“It is one of our delivery trucks. In connection with a delivery to a restaurant called Caliente, someone jumped into the truck and drove it away while the driver was unloading his delivery,” Spendrups spokesman Marten Luth told the Swedish news agency TT.
He said the original beer truck driver was not injured.
The truck crash appeared to be the latest attack in Europe using a vehicle.
Last month, in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group, a man drove into a crowd on London’s Westminster Bridge, killing three people and injuring many others before stabbing a policeman to death. He was shot dead by police. A fourth person, a woman thrown into the Thames by the force of the car attack, died Thursday. The IS group also claimed responsibility for a truck attack that killed 86 people in Nice, France, in July during a Bastille Day festival last year and another truck attack that killed 12 people at a Christmas market in Berlin.
Condolences poured into Sweden from top European Union officials and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
In neighbouring Finland, President Sauli Niinisto said he was shocked by the “maniac act of terror” in Stockholm.
“Every terror attack is to be equally condemned. But it touches us deeply when such an attack takes place in our Nordic neighbourhood,” Niinisto said.
EU Council President Donald Tusk said in a tweet that “my heart is in Stockholm this afternoon. My thoughts are with the victims and their families and friends of today’s terrible attack.”
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said “one of Europe’s most vibrant and colourful cities appears to have been struck by those wishing it — and our very way of life — harm.”
Juncker also said “an attack on any of our (EU) member states is an attack on us all” and that Sweden can count on EU help.
Swedish police launched a nationwide manhunt for the person or persons responsible.
Yesterday’s crash is near the site of a December 2010 attack in Stockholm in which Taimour Abdulwahab, a Swedish citizen who lived in Britain, detonated a suicide bomb, killing himself and injuring two others.
Abdulwahab had rigged a car with explosives in the hope the blast would drive people to Drottninggatan — the street hit yesterday — where he would set off devices strapped to his chest and back. The car bomb never went off, and Abdulwahab died when one of his devices exploded among panicked Christmas shoppers.