4 dead in truck terror
At least four killed in first attack of its kind on Swedish city Police issue CCTV image of possible suspect for atrocity
AT LEAST four people were killed and 15 injured when a suspected terrorist ploughed a lorry into city centre crowds in Stockholm yesterday.
The attacker left bodies strewn across Drottninggatan, a main shopping street in the Swedish capital, before fleeing.
The beer truck, hijacked as its driver was unloading, was rammed into a department store at the corner of a mall near the central station.
Flames leapt from the truck and pools of blood and shards of glass were seen as paramedics treated victims.
Video footage showed hundreds of pedestrians fleeing from the stolen truck as it blazed a trail of destruction in the first atrocity of its kind in the country.
“Sweden has been attacked. Everything points to a terrorist act,” the prime minister, Stefan Löfven, said.
A suspect was arrested last night after a police operation in Marsta, a suburb near the airport.
Police refused to confirm reports the man held was slightly injured and that he claimed he had carried out the attack.
Another man seen being handcuffed in the city centre was later released.
Stockholm was locked down as armed police cleared the area, broadcasting warnings to flee, and launched a manhunt for the terrorist.
Shots were reportedly fired in another part of the city but police said there was no connection between the incidents.
Police released a grainy image of a man caught on CCTV who they say is “a person of interest”.
The attack at 3pm yesterday came hours after the US launched missile strikes on Syria and followed a deadly pattern that has emerged over the past
year. Last July, a lorry driven into crowds in Nice killed 86. In December, a similar attack in Berlin claimed 12 lives.
Two weeks ago in London, Muslim convert Khalid Masood, 52, ploughed a car into pedestrians in Westminster before stabbing a policeman to death.
In Stockholm, British tourist Harriet Rose-Gale, 26, was 100 yards from where the truck mowed down shoppers.
Harriet, from Marlborough, Wiltshire, said: “We were having lunch when a couple of police cars went by followed by about 20 to 30 emergency vehicles.
“I walked up the road and we saw a lorry and what we could only assume was a body in front of it. It had a peach or orange towel covering it and there was another body with a white sheet in the middle of the road.
“There were armed police running past us and shouting. One officer said to just keep walking.
“Crowds were flooding along the street. There were lots of police with guns and lots and lots of sirens.”
Photographer Annevi Petersson was in a store when she heard screaming as the truck raced past.
She said: “I heard the noise and the screams then ran out and saw people lying on the street. One woman had a partly severed foot.
“People were screaming, others ran. I saw people lying bloody on the street and got out of there.”
Brewery Spendrups said their lorry was stolen on its way to a restaurant delivery. A spokesman said: “Someone jumped into the cab and drove off while the driver was unloading.”
Shortly after the attack, Stockholm’s station, metro and rail systems were all shut down.
Earlier this year, Sweden’s National Centre for Terrorism warned that Isis and al-Qaeda-inspired attacks were an imminent threat.
Police believe around 300 Swedes have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside insurgents in the past few years.
Although yesterday was the first vehicle attack, it is not the first time terrorists have struck in Stockholm.
In 2010, two bombs exploded near Drottninggatan, killing the terrorist and injuring two passers-by.
Last spring, a 20-year-old man was arrested and convicted of plotting an Isis-inspired attack using a homemade pressure-cooker bomb.
Kristina Andreasson, 35, of the Swedish Church in central London, said: “I try to think about the kindness I felt in London the day after the terror attack. I am holding on to that thought when I think about what the reaction of people in Sweden will be.”
Nineteen people were being treated in hospital after a train struck a truck on an unguarded railway crossing in the Polish village of Schodnia yesterday.