Finland knife rampage: Moroccan asylum seeker is identified as killer as police say he targeted women

A Moroccan asylum seeker arrested after a stabbing spree in Finland that killed two people was targeting women, police said yesterday.

The two killed and six of the eight injured were women.

“We think that the attacker especially targeted women and the men were wounded after coming to their defence” superintendent Christa Granroth of Finland’s national bureau of investigation said.

The bureau said earlier it was investigating the stabbings on Friday as “murders with terrorist intent”.

Of the two men who were injured, one had been trying to help a victim and the other tried to stop the attacker, Ms Granroth said.

The women killed were Finnish citizens, while the eight wounded included an Italian, a Briton and a Swede.

Three were still in intensive care, with one more in hospital and four released. The youngest victim was 15 and the oldest 67, police said.

Police shot and arrested the attacker minutes after the afternoon stabbing rampage at a busy market square in Turku, in south-western Finland.

He was identified only as an 18-year-old Moroccan national who had arrived in Finland early last year and sought asylum.

Police refused to comment on reports that the man’s asylum application had been rejected.

The Moroccan was being treated in hospital and had yet to be questioned. Four Moroccan acquaintances living in Turku were held on suspicion of involvement, police said.

Police also said they had impounded a white Fiat Ducato but provided no information about how it was linked to the stabbings. The owner of the car lives in a building in Varissuo, Turku’s largest suburb, about 7 kilometres from the site of the attack.

The national bureau of investigation said it was working with the Finnish security intelligence service, police in Turku

and the European Union’s police agency, Europol.

Europol was helping to check whether the stabbings were connected to the terrorist attacks in Spain, which were claimed by ISIL.

Finland’s intelligence service raised its threat assessment to the second level of a fourstep scale in June, because of the country’s “stronger profile within the radical Islamist propaganda”. Finland is now considered part of the coalition against ISIL, it said.

The interior ministry ordered flags to fly at half-mast across Finland yesterday in honour of the victims.

Security at airports and train stations was increased and there were more police officers on the streets.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto attended a vigil in the Turku Cathedral on Friday evening in honour of the victims.

“We need to stick together now, hate is not to be answered by hate,” prime minister Juha Sipila said in a tweet.

Finland’s intelligence service raised its threat assessment level and said it was now considered part of the coalition against ISIL