Sweden school attack: police investigate racist motive for double murder Read more

Sweden has reacted with shock and horror after a teacher and pupil were stabbed to death in a school with a high number of immigrants by a masked man who was reported to have far-right sympathies. The man, who posed with students before starting his killing spree, was shot dead by police.

He was named in Swedish media as 21-year-old Anton Lundin Pettersson.

There were scenes of panic in Trollhättan, an industrial city near Gothenburg, on Thursday as parents and pupils crowded outside Kronan school in the aftermath of the killings among large numbers of police and ambulances.

“It is a black day for Sweden,” said the prime minister, Stefan Löfven, before rushing to the city. King Carl Gustaf said Sweden was “in shock” following the attack and that the royal family received the news “with great dismay and sadness”.

A teacher died at the scene, while a 17-year-old died later in hospital from stab wounds. Two more people, aged 15 and 41, were in a critical condition on Thursday night. Police said they had identified the attacker as a 21-year-old male but gave no further information.

The killings took place in a school with a high proportion of immigrants, raising fears the killer’s motives may have been racist. The anti-racist organisation Expo, citing reliable sources, said it knew the identity of the attacker, who “during the past month showed clear sympathies with the extreme right and anti-immigration movements”.

Daniel Poohl, from the organisation, said: “It is too early to say anything concrete about the killer’s motives, but perhaps he was a lone wolf with far-right sympathies. This is traumatic for Sweden, something we haven’t seen before.”

Soon after the attacks, which happened at about 10am (0900 BST) on Thursday morning, a picture emerged of an ordinary school day that turned suddenly into a scene of terror.

“When we first saw him we thought it was a joke. He had a mask and black clothes and a long sword. There were students who wanted to go with him and hold the sword,” a student at the school told Swedish broadcaster SVT.

Mobile phone images of the suspect show a man in a helmet resembling that used by the Nazis, holding a sword and wearing what was described as a Star Wars mask. According to several witnesses, he allowed himself to be photographed with students, who took it to be a Halloween prank. Police said the man carried more than one weapon, including “at least one knife-like object”.

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“One of my classmates’ sisters called her to warn her there was a murderer at the school,” a pupil told TheLocal.se. “So we locked the door to the classroom, but our teacher was still outside in the corridor. We wanted to warn him, so a few of us went outside and then I saw the murderer, he was wearing a mask and had a sword. Our teacher got stabbed. The murderer started chasing me, I ran into another classroom. If I had not run, I would have been murdered.”

In a week when Sweden has basked in international attention after Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said the US needed to move closer to Scandinavia, Swedes now fear that, on the contrary, the country is emulating the violence familiar to US schools. Since 1961, when one young person died and six were injured in a shooting at a school near Gothenburg, only one person has died in Sweden in school violence. Police say they foiled a planned school shooting in Malmö in 2004, and threats of violence have occurred elsewhere.

But the tragedy in Trollhättan has forced Swedes to ask if the traditional openness of their society may be putting pupils and teachers at risk. The school’s cafeteria and library were both open to the public.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Onlookers stand outside a cordoned area after the attack. Photograph: Tt News Agency/Reuters

“Of course schools should be open to society, but not like this, not so anyone can walk in,” said Bo Jansson, head of the teachers’ union.

“I am not sure we want a situation like in the US with detectors and security guards, but in workplaces, offices and apartments you have security – why should schools have a worse situation?”

In June, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate fined the city council 600,000 kronor (£46,000) for “substantial shortcomings in the areas of security and the study environment” at Kronan school. The inspectorate found a high turnover of staff, who lived in fear of some students and struggled to keep order.

This week, the cross-party education group on Trollhattän city council visited the school to look at the security situation. After Thursday’s attack, councillor Peter Eriksson, of the opposition Conservatives, said the cafeteria should be closed to the public “because it creates a precarious situation for the students”.

But other councillors defended the school, which was only six years old and had seen substantial investment. “This kind of thing could happen in any school,” said Sofia Andersson, for the ruling Social Democrats in the city.

It is difficult to speak about security measures in a Swedish context because people want an open society, said Magnus Lindgren, of the Safer Sweden foundation. “In recent years cities that were already safe have become even more safe, but neighbourhoods that already had problems with crime have got worse – we can see a polarisation.”

With more than 400 pupils, Kronan school is at the heart of Kronogården, a disadvantaged area where more than half the population was born abroad. Trollhättan has been named by researchers as the most highly segregated city in Sweden, with immigrants concentrated in Kronogården. The neighbourhood was among 38 named this month as Sweden’s most vulnerable in a report on “forgotten suburbs”.

There has been a tense debate over immigration and asylum in Sweden, with the far-right seeking to exploit incidents of violence involving immigrants. In August, a refused asylum seeker stabbed two people to death in an Ikea store near Stockholm, causing a storm of outrage.

There has been a spate of apparent arson attacks on refugee accommodation in the past week. Two hours before the attack in Trollhättan, officials announced Sweden was expecting to receive as many as 190,000 refugees this year – twice previous estimates.