Police: Deadly school attack a hate crime

Officials say killing 2, wounding 2, was racially motivated.

Attacker was fatally shot by police.

TROLLHATTAN, SWEDEN Thursday’s attack at — a Swedish school was a racially motivated, carefully planned rampage, police said Friday.

The 21-year-old masked man marched through the Swedish school with a sword and a knife, methodically selecting his victims. Within minutes, two people had been stabbed to death and two others seriously wounded before the attacker was fatally shot by police.

Swedish police on Friday labeled the stabbing attack in Trollhattan a hate crime based on discoveries they made when searching the man’s home, the way he dressed, his behavior at the scene and the way he selected his victims.

The southern industrial town has a large immigrant population among its 56,000 people, and most students at Kronan school, where the attack took place, are foreign-born.

“All together, this gives a picture that the perpetrator had a racist motive when he committed the crimes at Kronan school,” Trollhattan police said in a statement. “His way of marching points to Nazism.”

Police have not identified the attacker, a local man who died in the hospital of his gunshot wound later Thursday.

Senior police officer Niclas Hallgren told a news conference that surveillance videos showed him roaming with a sword and a sharp knife Thursday morning inside the school.

On the video, police noticed how he “selects his victims. And those with dark skin were attacked,” investigator Thord Haraldsson told reporters. “The victims were dark-skinned.”

Evidence appears to show that he acted alone, Haraldsson said, adding that police found “a kind of suicide note” in his apartment. In it, the attacker “tells us by that letter that he considers this his final act,” Hallgren said.

The sword’s sheath was found inside a car parked near the school, Haraldsson said.

None of the victims have been identified by authorities. However, local newspaper GT cited relatives as saying those who died were 20-yearold Lavin Eskandar, a mentor at the school, and Ahmed Hassan, a 15-yearold student.

A few hundred people held an anti-racism protest Friday outside the school, whose roughly 400 pupils range from pre-school to high school. “No to racism, no to hatred,” one poster read.

Once Sweden’s busy industrial city, a center for heavy industries and car production, Trollhattan has been struggling with unemployment for years. It now has Sweden’s highest jobless rate — 14.1 percent in 2014 against 8 percent for the whole country. In addition, the city’s rate of people with higher education is 20.9 percent, below the national average of 25.1 percent.

“This is a quiet place. A very nice place to live. It is not a racist place,” said Abdul Asiz Kassim, a 37-year-old Somali translator who came to Sweden 23 years ago. “What happened here yesterday ... nobody can stop.”

The attack stunned Sweden, where violent crime is relatively rare, although there has been a spate of arson attacks on asylum centers in recent weeks as an influx of refugees has surged. Immigration officials estimate some 190,000 asylum-seekers will arrive this year.