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Sweden Police: Racism Investigated In School Shooting

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

STOCKHOLM (Worthy News) – Swedish police investigated Thursday whether the country’s worst mass shooting on record was racially motivated after it emerged that people of several nationalities, including Syrians, were among the 11 killed by a lone gunman at a school for adult education.

Anna Bergqvist, who is leading the police investigation, said people of “multiple nationalities, different genders, and different ages” were among those killed at Risbergska school in the city of Örebro on Tuesday.

Asked by reporters whether there was any evidence of racist motivation for the attack, Bergqvist said: “We are looking at all of those parts.”

The Syrian embassy in Stockholm announced its citizens were among the dead. “With deep sorrow and grief, the embassy of the Syrian Arab Republic in the kingdom of Sweden expresses its strong condemnation of the criminal incident that took place in the Swedish city of Örebro, which resulted in … innocent victims,” the embassy wrote on social media.

“It extends its sincere condolences to the families of the victims, including dear Syrian citizens, and to the friendly Swedish people, and we wish a speedy recovery to the injured.”

Among the victims was Salim Iskef, 28, who phoned his fiancee from the school and told her he had been shot. “He called me and said, “I’ve been shot, they shot us.’ He said he loves me, and that’s the last thing I heard,” Kareen Elia, 24, told the media in tears. During the video call, she could see somebody lying still beside him and blood on his hand.

The couple planned to marry on 25 July. They had booked the venue, and Elia, who moved to Sweden from Syria in 2015, had tried on her wedding dress.

The tragic details came after, on Wednesday, the Swedish king, Carl XVI Gustaf, and Queen Silvia visited a memorial near the scene of the mass shooting. The king told reporters that he and the queen were “extremely upset” by what happened. He said: ‘We want them to feel that they are not alone in their mourning.’

The gun attack on Tuesday that left 11 people dead, including the gunman, and six in hospital was “a one-man operation, police said.

Sweden has struggled with a wave of shootings and bombings caused by what observers have called endemic gang crime.

It has led to the country having by far the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the EU in recent years. Sweden, long an open society, recently joined the NATO military alliance.