Bow and arrow rampage suspect is Islamic convert
A MAN who killed five people in a bow-and-arrow attack is a radicalised terrorist who had posted chilling threats online.
Muslim convert Espen Andersen Brathen, 37, killed four women and a man aged between 50 and 70 in Kongsberg, south-east Norway, yesterday.
A female artist in her 50s was one of those murdered.
Hanne Englund is believed to have been left dying in a pool of blood outside her home where she lived with her husband.
Warning
Three people, including an off-duty police officer, were wounded. He appeared to pick his victims at random. Police said the killings looked to be an “act of terror”.
In 2017, the Danish national, said by a friend to be a paranoid schizophrenic, posted sinister videos on YouTube, one in Norwegian and one in English.
He warned: “Hello, I am a messenger. I come with a warning...Bear witness that I am a Muslim.” Last year his family took out a restraining order after he threatened to shoot dead his father and a friend urged police to intervene “before lives are lost”.
Brathen has a Norwegian father and a Danish mother but is understood to have spent most of his life in Norway. Yesterday’s attack began when police confronted Brathen inside a Coop supermarket at about 5.15pm local time.
Officers took cover when he fired arrows at them before fleeing, but Brathen was arrested 35 minutes later when cornered by armed police. Prosecutor Ann Iren Svane Mathiassen said he admitted the killings.
An eyewitness said: “I saw people running for their lives. One of them was a woman holding a child by the hand.”
A relative of Brathen said: “The last thing I heard about him was how he turned up at his mother’s home with a sabre in a bag. She ran away.”
Norway’s prime minister Jonas Gahr Stoere called the killings “gruesome and brutal” and King Harald said: “We’re horrified by the tragic events.”