Sweden is reeling from the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history on Wednesday after 10 people and their suspected attacker were killed at an adult education center in the city of Orebro, and many questions remain unanswered.
Several media reported that the suspect took his own life with a firearm, but the police did not want to confirm those reports.
“Eleven people are dead, including the killer,” police told AFP of Tuesday’s massacre at the Risbergska adult school.
Police did not comment on the number of wounded or how serious their injuries were, but the southern province of Orebro announced on Tuesday that six people had been taken to hospital with gunshot wounds.
“This is the worst mass shooting in Swedish history,” Prime Minister Ulf Kristerson said at a press conference late Tuesday.
He pointed out that “many questions are still unanswered”.
“But the time will come when we will know what happened, how it could have happened and what the motives might be behind it,” Kristerson said, urging people not to “guess.”
“The motive for the shooting is still unknown, but everything points to the fact that the perpetrator acted alone, without an ideological motive,” Orebro police announced in a press release.
The police did not provide any information about the identity or age of the dead or whether they were students or teachers of the school.
School attacks are relatively rare in Sweden, but the country faces gang-related shootings or bombings that kill dozens each year.
“The perpetrator is not known to the police, he is not connected to the gang. We believe that there will be no further attacks,” Roberto Eid Forest, chief of police in Orebro, told reporters on Tuesday evening.
‘Blood was everywhere’
Meanwhile, the Swedish television channel TV4 announced that the police searched the suspect’s home in Orebro on Tuesday afternoon.
The channel reported that the suspect was around 35 years old, had a license to carry weapons, had no criminal record, but did not provide details about his identity.
The man lived in seclusion, was unemployed, and distanced himself from his family and friends, Aftonbladet newspaper reported, citing family members.
The shooting happened around noon on Tuesday.
“I was standing there watching what was going on and I was about there when I saw the bodies lying on the ground. I don’t know if they were dead or injured,” 16-year-old Lin, who attends a school near the incident, told an AFP correspondent at the scene.
“There was blood everywhere, people were panicking and crying, parents were worried… it was chaos,” she added, her voice shaking.
Two teachers of the school, Miriam DJareval and Patrik Soderman, told the newspaper Dagens Niter that they heard gunfire in the corridor.
“Students came and said that someone was shooting. Then we heard more shots in the corridor. We didn’t go out, we hid in our offices,” they said.
“First there was a lot of gunfire, then it was quiet for half an hour, and then it started again. We were lying under our tables.”
‘Dark Moment’
Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf said in a statement that he received the news of the shooting with “sadness and horror.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the event as “truly terrifying”.
“There is no place in our societies for such violence and terror, least of all in schools. In this dark moment, we stand with the people of Sweden,” she wrote in a post on the social network.
Although such shootings are rare, several other violent incidents have hit Swedish schools in recent years.
An 18-year-old student stabbed two teachers to death at a school in the southern city of Malmö in March 2022.
Two months earlier, a 16-year-old was arrested after stabbing another student and a teacher at a school in the small town of Kristianstad.
A saber-wielding attacker killed two people in October 2015 in a racist attack in the western city of Trollhattan and was later killed by police.
