Sweden suspect sought asylum
Police probing truck attack say man eluded deportation.
STOCKHOLM — The Stockholm truck attack suspect was a rejected asylum seeker from Uzbekistan who eluded authorities’ attempts to deport him by giving police a wrong address, Swedish police said Sunday while announcing the arrest of a second suspect.
Jan Evensson of the Stockholm police told a news conference that the 39-year-old suspect’s request for a residence permit was rejected in June, but police could not find him to send him back to his native country because he was not at the address he had given. Police said he was ordered to leave Sweden in December, but that they only started formally seeking him on Feb. 24.
“It makes me frustrated,” Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told Swedish news agency TT on Sunday.
Jonas Hysing of Sweden’s national police declined to name the suspect, who was arrested within hours of Friday’s attack on shoppers in Stockholm.
“We know he has been sympathetic to extremist organizations,” Hysing said.
A second person has been arrested in connection with the attack and is suspected of terrorist offenses, including murder, spokesman Karin Rosander told The Associated Press. She did not give further details about the new suspect. Four others were being held by police.
Evensson said authorities have questioned more than 500 people in the investigation so far.
The four people killed in Friday’s attack, in which a hijacked beer truck was driven into an upscale department store, included a British man, a Belgian woman and two Swedes, authorities in those countries said. Their identities were not released by Swedish officials.
The British government named the Briton as Chris Bevington, an executive at Swedish music-streaming service Spotify. Britain’s
Press Association news agency said he was 41. In Brussels, the Belga news agency said the Belgian woman had been reported missing before she was identified by her identity papers and later by DNA testing.
As of Sunday, 10 of the 15 people wounded in the truck attack in the Swedish capital remained hospitalized, including one child.
Stockholm county spokesman Patrik Soderberg said four of the 10 were considered “seriously” injured and the remaining six, including the child, were slightly injured.
Soderberg said it was important that caregivers continue to give “long-term psychological support to those who need it.”
One of the wounded, an 83-year-old Romanian woman who was begging on the city’s pedestrian Drottninggatan shopping street when the attack took place, says she was surprised that passers-by helped her.
“I thought everyone would run past me and save themselves,” Papusa Ciuraru, whose foot was crushed by a boulder displaced by the speeding truck, told the Expressen daily.
Speaking from her bed at the Saint Goran hospital in Stockholm, she said she “thought a war was going on” because “people around me were screaming.”
The lion-shaped boulders on Drottninggatan are meant as roadblocks and have been put up in several European capitals after a truck attack last year killed 12 people at a Christmas market in Berlin.
Ciuraru, who expects to be released today from the hospital, said she “tried to get up and run, but got a huge rock over my leg.”
On Sunday, tens of thousands of people gathered in bright sunshine on the downtown Sergelstorg square, near the site of the truck crash, for a memorial rally.
Rickard Sjoberg, one of the organizers, told the crowd there were probably people from out of town among them. “But today, we’re all Stockholmers,” he said to applause.
However, the attack left Swedes divided.
“You have one [side] saying ‘This is enough, we can’t have this. We must close the borders, throw everyone out,’” said Ulf Lundgren, a clergyman at Stockholm Cathedral. “Others say, ‘You can’t get security by closing the borders.’”
The Scandinavian country of 10 million took in 163,000 refugees in 2015 — the highest per-capita rate in Europe. Since then the government has tried to be more selective about which newcomers it allows to stay.
Swedish police said Sunday they had received roughly 12,500 referrals from the Swedish Migration Board of people who, like the suspect in the truck attack, had overstayed their welcome.
The upscale department store that was rammed Friday by the truck apologized for an announcement that it would reopen two days later to sell damaged goods at a “reduced price.”
A fire broke out Friday afternoon at the Ahlens store after the truck smashed into shoppers at its entrance on Drottninggatan street. It was quickly put out by firefighters.
The store said it would reopen today “without any damaged goods.”
Information for this article was contributed by Jan M. Olsen, Hakan Kaplan and Pietro DeCristofaro of The Associated Press.