Swedes arrest Uzbek in truck attack
39-year-old man known to authorities but was not monitored, security chief says
STOCKHOLM — Swedish police said Saturday that they had arrested a 39-yearold Uzbekistan-born man they believed had hijacked a beer truck and carried out a terrorist attack by driving the truck into a crowd of people in Stockholm the day before, killing four people and injuring more than a dozen.
Prosecutors and police officials did not identify the suspect, but Anders Thornberg, head of the Swedish Security Service, said at a news conference that the man had been on authorities’ radar some time ago.
Thornberg said the agency had looked into information it received on the suspect last year but that it had not led to anything. He said the suspect was not on any current list of people being monitored.
“The suspect didn’t appear in our recent files, but he earlier has been in our files,” Thornberg said.
The Swedish national broadcaster SVT reported that a bag with explosives had been found in the truck used in the attack.
On Saturday, the police chief, Dan Eliasson, said, “We have found something in the truck in the driver’s compartment, a technical device that should not be there. I cannot say whether this is a bomb or some sort of flammable material.”
Prosecutors said the suspect had not spoken, and there was no immediate word of any criminal charges. But Eliasson said there was “nothing to indicate we have the wrong person.” He added, “We cannot exclude the possibility that others are involved.”
Lars Bystrom, a spokesman for the regional police, said earlier Saturday, “We have one person in custody, and we think he is the driver of the truck.”
Eliasson would not say how long the suspect had been living in Sweden.
“We are focusing on how he entered the country, where has he been,” he said. “We need to establish what kind of contacts he had.”
On Saturday, people placed flowers outside the department store in Stockholm where the attack occurred as a memorial to the victims. Karolinska Hospital said six of the injured had been released.
The attack fueled debate over the country’s immigration policy.
“We have been too liberal to take in people who perhaps we thought would have good minds. But we are too good-hearted,” said Stockholm resident Ulov Ekdahl, a 67-year-old commercial broker who went to the memorial.
Joachim Kemiri, who was born in Sweden to a Tunisian father and a Swedish mother, said migrants and refugees had been arriving in too large numbers.
“Too many of them have been coming in too fast,” the 29-year-old railway worker said. “It’s too much.”
Sweden has long been known for its open-door policy toward migrants and refugees. But after the Scandinavian country of 10 million took in a record 163,000 refugees in 2015 — the highest per-capita rate in Europe — Prime Minister Stefan Lofven conceded it could no longer cope with the influx.
On Saturday, Lofven laid flowers at the truck crash site, declaring Monday a national day of mourning, with a minute of silence at noon. He urged people to “get through this” and strolled through the streets of the capital to talk with them.
The beer truck, stolen earlier Friday, mowed down pedestrians along Drottninggatan, a busy pedestrian shopping street. It came to a stop after slamming into the Ahlens department store.
The manhunt brought transit systems to a halt and put Parliament under lockdown. The suspect was detained in a northern Stockholm suburb Friday and later arrested on accusations of having committed a terrorism crime, police said.
Elias Broth, 19, a high school senior, was on a bus at the intersection of Drottninggatan and Kungsgatan when he heard a loud noise.
“I look up and I see the truck passing by, driving really fast,” he said by phone Saturday. “Then I heard a big boom when it crashed into people.”
He said he had stayed in the bus a bit longer, before taking shelter in a clothing store on Kungsgatan.
“The first thing I saw when I stepped off the bus was a woman. Her body was in pieces,” he said.
While the city was under lockdown, the hashtag #openstockholm sprang up on Twitter.
Jenny Nguyen, 22, a law student in Stockholm, said she had come up with the hashtag to encourage people to open their homes to commuters, tourists and others who were stranded after the transit system was shut down.
“This idea is actually not a new one,” she said in a phone interview. “I was following the attack in Paris when that occurred. I saw that someone started a hashtag to tell people where to go and where they could find company.”
“Suddenly, I felt the world was not as dark as people who commit these types of actions want it to be,” she said.