By Johan Ahlander and Simon Johnson
OREBRO, Sweden (Reuters) – Swedish police found several rifles in the adult education centre in Orebro where a gunman killed 11 people and wounded several others this week in the country’s deadliest mass shooting, a spokesperson said on Thursday.
Police believe the suspected killer – identified by a Reuters source and Swedish media as Rickard Andersson, a 35-year-old unemployed recluse – acted alone.
“We have found several weapons in the school. They are so-called long guns, rifles,” a police spokesperson told Reuters. “They are licensed guns and can be linked to the suspected perpetrator.”
Sweden has a high level of gun ownership by European standards, mainly linked to hunting, though it is much lower than in the United States. A wave of gang crime in recent years has highlighted the high incidence of illegal weapons.
The attack occurred on Tuesday at the Risbergska adult education centre in Orebro, a city of more than 100,000 people some 200 km (125 miles) west of Stockholm.
Swedish authorities have said there was no evidence so far that the shooter, whose body was discovered at the scene, had “ideological motives”.
The police have not confirmed the name of the suspect and the number of wounded remains unclear, two days after the attack at the school, which offers adult courses and Swedish language classes for immigrants.
BARRICADED IN CLASSROOMS
While Sweden has suffered a wave of gun violence in recent years related to gang crime, the nation has been shocked by the brutality of Tuesday’s crime.
Survivors barricaded themselves in classrooms and hid under beds to escape the killer. When they were released by police, they spoke of seeing pools of blood where victims had been shot. Police are still working to formally identify the dead.
“There is still a lot of work to be done there and not everyone has been definitively identified,” the police spokesperson said. “There are formalities for that.”
While police have yet to disclose the identities of the victims, the Syriac-Orthodox church in Orebro said on Facebook one of its members, a man, was among the dead in the shooting.
Many students in Sweden’s adult school system are immigrants seeking qualifications to help them find jobs in the Nordic country, while also learning Swedish.
The Campus Risbergska school has around 2,700 pupils, around 800 of whom were enrolled in Swedish for Immigrants courses, according to information provided by the local authority.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who called the attack a “dark day” for Sweden, is holding a regular gathering of the government on Thursday and has invited all the opposition parties to attend in a show of political unity.
Unlike in many countries, access to schools in Sweden is generally not tightly controlled. Speaking to Swedish Radio, School Minister Lotta Edholm, said that should change.
“I think that schools, exactly like most other workplaces, should in fact be locked and that it should be the head of the school who decides who can come in,” she said.
(Reporting by Johan Ahlander in Orebro, Simon Johnson in Stockholm; writing by Niklas Pollard; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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