ÖREBRO: Around 10 people were killed on Tuesday in a shooting at an education centre in Sweden, including the suspected gunman, with the Swedish prime minister branding it the “worst mass shooting“ in the country’s history.
Authorities had initially said that several people were wounded in the violence at Campus Risbergska, a secondary school for young adults in the town of Orebro, but had not reported any fatalities.
School attacks are relatively rare in Sweden, but the country has suffered shootings and bombings linked to gang violence that kill dozens of people each year.
“Around 10 people have been killed today,“ Orebro police chief Roberto Eid Forest told reporters, adding that police could “not be more specific about the number due to the large number of wounded”.
He provided no details about the number of wounded.
“This is the worst mass shooting in Swedish history,“ Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told a press conference.
Forest said police were not aware of a motive yet, but believed the gunman had acted alone.
Police did not disclose any information about the identity or ages of the dead, nor whether they were students or teachers at the school.
Several media reported the suspected gunman turned his gun on himself but police would not confirm those reports.
Kristersson noted a lot of “questions were still unanswered.”
“There will come a time when we will know what happened, how it could happen and what motives may have been behind it,“ Kristersson said, urging people not to “speculate”.
– ‘Shooting in the hallway’ –
Forest said police received the first reports of a school shooting at 12:33 pm (1133 GMT), but could not specify how it unfolded.
The attacker is also believed to have carried some form of equipment to create smoke inside the school, he added.
Two Campus Risbergska teachers, Miriam Jarlevall and Patrik Soderman, told newspaper Dagens Nyheter they heard gunfire in a hallway.
“Students came and said someone was shooting. Then we heard more shooting in the hallway. We didn’t go out, we hid in our offices,“ they said.
“There were a lot of gunshots at first and then it was quiet for a half-hour and then it started again. We were lying under our desks, cowering.”
Some witnesses told Swedish media they heard what they believed to be automatic gunfire.
Swedish television channel TV4 meanwhile reported that police had raided the suspect’s home in Orebro late on Tuesday afternoon.
It said the suspect was around 35 years old and had a license to carry a weapon and no criminal record, but did not provide any details about his identity.
Police have not confirmed that information.
– ‘Bodies on the ground’ –
“I was standing there, watching what was happening, and I was just around here when I saw some bodies lying on the ground. I don’t know if they were dead or injured,“ 16-year-old Linn, who goes to school near the site of the massacre, 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 trembling.
Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf said in a statement that he had received the news of the shooting with “sadness and dismay.”
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen described the event as “truly horrifying.”
“Such violence and terror have no place in our societies — least of all in schools. In this dark hour, we stand with the people of Sweden,“ she said in a post to X.
Students in several nearby schools as well as the one in question had been locked in for several hours “for safety reasons” before gradually being released, police said.
A mother whose son was kept indoors at his nearby school for several hours during the police operation told AFP she was “shocked” and “angry”.
“My son is at this school behind us, they’re locked in too. They have to hide, so I’m waiting for them to evacuate,“ Cia Sandell, 42, said on Tuesday afternoon.
“This is crazy, totally crazy. I’m angry, I’m shocked. This shouldn’t happen,“ she said.
Though such shootings are rare, several other violent incidents have struck Swedish schools in recent years.
In March 2022, an 18-year-old student stabbed two teachers to death at a secondary school in the southern city of Malmo.
Two months earlier, a 16-year-old was arrested after wounding another student and a teacher with a knife at a school in the small town of Kristianstad.
In October 2015, three people were killed in a racially motivated attack at a school in the western town of Trollhattan by a sword-wielding assailant who was later killed by police.
