Eleven people have been killed in a shooting at an adult education centre in the Swedish city of Orebro, police said.
The incident on February 4 marked the country’s deadliest gun attack and the Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Hjalmar Kristersson called it a “painful day.”
Based on latest investigative and intelligence information, there was no evidence the killer had acted on ideological motives, the police said on their website.
They said the gunman was believed to be among those killed and a search for other possible victims was continuing at the establishment. The gunman’s motive was not immediately known.
“We know that 10 or so people have been killed here today. The reason that we can’t be more exact currently is that the extent of the incident is so large,” local police chief Roberto Eid Forest told a news conference immediately after the shootings.
Later, the police website stated: “At this time, there are 11 deaths due to the incident. The number of injured is still unclear. We currently have no information on the condition of those who have been injured.”
Forest told the press conference police believed the gunman had acted alone and that terrorism was not suspected as a motive. He said the suspected gunman had not previously been known to police.
“We have a big crime scene, we have to complete the searches we are conducting in the school. There are a number of investigative steps we are taking: a profile of the perpetrator, witness interviews,” he said.
The shooting took place in Orebro, some 200km West of Stockholm, at the Risbergska school for adult education. It is located on a campus that also has schools for children.
Local media spoke to Ali Elmokad who was outside the Orebro University Hospital, concerned about a relative.
“We’ve been trying to get hold of him all day, we haven’t been successful,” he said, adding that he had a friend who also attended the school.
“What she saw was so terrible. She only saw people lying on the floor, injured and blood everywhere.”
Police said officers were still serching the crime scene and several addresses in Orebro following the attack.
Late on February 4, police vans and personnel were still outside an apartment building in central Orebro that had been raided earlier.
“We saw a lot of police with drawn weapons,” Lingam Tuohmaki, 42, who lives in the same building, told media. “We were at home and heard a commotion outside.”
Kristersson said it was the worst mass shooting in Swedish history.
“It is hard to take in the full extent of what has happened today – the darkness that now lowers itself across Sweden tonight,” he told a news conference.
King Carl XVI Gustav conveyed his condolences. “It is with deep sadness and dismay that my family and I received the news about the terrible atrocity in Orebro,” he said.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed her sympathy on X, saying: “In this dark hour, we stand with the people of Sweden.”
Maria Pegado, 54, a teacher at the school, said someone threw open the door to her classroom just after lunch break and shouted to everyone to get out.
“I took all my 15 students out into the hallway and we started running,” she told Reuters. “Then I heard two shots but we made it out. We were close to the school entrance.
“I saw people dragging injured out, first one, then another. I realised it was very serious,” she said.
Many students in Sweden‘s adult school system we said to be immigrants seeking to improve their basic education and gain degrees to help them find jobs in the Nordic country while also learning Swedish.
Sweden has been struggling with a wave of shootings and bombings caused by an endemic gang crime problem that has seen the country of 10 million people record by far the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the European Union in recent years, Reuters said.
Fatal attacks at schools, though, are rare. Ten people were killed in seven incidents of deadly violence at schools between 2010 and 2022, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.
Sweden has a high level of gun ownership by European standards, mainly linked to hunting. It is much lower than in the US, although gang crime wave has highlighted the relatively high incidence of illegal weapons in the Nordic nation.
In 2015, in one of the highest-profile crimes of the past decade in Sweden, a 21-year-old masked assailant driven by racist motives killed a teaching assistant and a boy and wounded two others.
In 2017, a man driving a lorry mowed down shoppers on a busy street in central Stockholm before crashing into a department store. Five people died in that attack.
