A truck ploughed into a crowd on a shopping street and crashed into a department store in central Stockholm yesterday, killing four people and wounding 15 in what the prime minister said appeared to be a terrorist attack.
Swedish police said they had arrested one person after earlier circulating a picture of a man wearing a grey hoodie.
They did not rule out the possibility other attackers were involved.
“We have a person who is arrested who may have connections to the event in Stockholm earlier today,” police spokesperson Towe Hagg said.
The incident occurred just before 1300 GMT at the corner of the store and Drottninggatan, the city’s biggest pedestrian street, above ground from Stockholm’s central subway station.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
Witnesses described scenes of terror and panic.
“I turned around and saw a big truck coming towards me. It swerved from side to side. It didn’t look out of control, it was trying to hit people,” Glen Foran, an Australian tourist in his 40s, told Reuters.
“It hit people, it was terrible. It hit a pram with a kid in it, demolished it,” he said. “It took a long time for police to get here. I suppose from their view it was quick, but it felt like forever.”
One witness identified only as Dimitris told the Aftonbladet daily that the truck came “out of nowhere”.
“I couldn’t see if anyone was driving but it was out of control. I saw at least two people get run down. I ran as fast as I could away from there,” he said.
Another shopper, 66-year-old Leander Nordling, was at Ahlens when he suddenly heard a loud bang.
“It sounded like a bomb exploding and smoke starting pouring in through the main entrance,” he told daily Aftonbladet.
He and fellow shoppers took refuge in a supply closet inside the department store.
“After that the building was evacuated ... there were a lot of guards who took care of us outside and they urged us to leave the scene immediately,” Nordling said.
Part of central Stockholm was cordoned off and the area was evacuated, including the main train station.
All subway traffic was halted on police orders.
Government offices were closed.
“Sweden has been attacked. Everything points to the fact that this is a terrorist attack,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told reporters during a visit to western Sweden.
He was immediately returning to the capital.
Many police and emergency services personnel were at the scene, said a Reuters witness who saw police officers put what appeared to be two bodies into body bags.
Bloody tyre tracks on Drottninggatan (Queen Street) showed where the truck had passed.
The truck had been stolen while making a beer delivery to a tapas bar further up Drottninggatan, Spendrups Brewery spokesman Marten Lyth said.
A masked person jumped into the cab, started the truck and drove away.
“We were standing by the traffic lights at Drottninggatan and then we heard some screaming and saw a truck coming,” a witness who declined to be named told Reuters.
“Then it drove into a pillar at Ahlens City (department store) where the hood started burning. When it stopped we saw a man lying under the tyre. It was terrible to see,” said the man, who saw the incident from his car.
Police said four people had died and 15 were injured.
National news agency TT said those hurt included the delivery driver, who had tried to stop the hijack.
The attack followed a string of assaults in Europe by people using vehicles as weapons.
The deadliest attack came last year in France on the Bastille Day national holiday of July 14, when a man rammed a truck into a crowd in the Mediterranean resort of Nice, killing 86 people.
He was shot dead by police, and the Islamic State (IS) group later claimed responsibility.
Last month, Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old convert to Islam known to British security services, drove a car at high speed into pedestrians on London’s Westminster Bridge before launching a frenzied knife attack on a police officer guarding the parliament building.
The incident killed five people, while Masood himself was shot dead by police.
And in December, a man hijacked a truck and slammed into shoppers at a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people.
That attacker was shot dead by police in Milan four days later, and the rampage was claimed by the IS.
In 2014, IS called for attacks on citizens of Western countries and gave instructions on how they could be carried out without military equipment, using rocks or knives, or by running people over in vehicles.
Attacks have not been limited to Europe.
In 2014, a Muslim convert used his car to mow down two soldiers near Montreal, killing one of them.
The attacker was shot dead by police as he climbed out of his wrecked vehicle brandishing a knife.
Magnus Ranstorp, head of terrorism research at the Swedish Defence University, told Reuters that the attacker’s approach was similar to those in Berlin and Nice: “Hijacking a truck, that has happened before.”
“And this is a pretty cunning modus operandi,” he said. “To drive to Ahlens (department store) and stop … there is a way down to the subway just a few metres away from there, and then you ... can jump on any train you want and quickly disappear.”
Sweden’s King Carl Gustaf said in a statement: “Our thoughts are going out to those that were affected, and to their families.”
“An attack on any of our member states is an attack on us all,” said European Union chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker.
Stockholmers opened up their homes and offered lifts to people who were unable to get home or needed a place to stay.
The attack was the latest to hit the Nordic region after shootings in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2015 that killed three people and the 2011 bombing and shooting by far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik that killed 77 people in Norway.
Sweden has not been hit by a large-scale attack, although in December 2010, a man blew himself up only a few hundred yards from the site of the latest incident in a failed suicide attack.
In February US President Donald Trump falsely suggested there had been an immigration-related security incident in Sweden, to the bafflement of Swedes.
Swedish authorities raised the national security threat level to four on a scale of five in October 2010 but lowered the level to three, indicating a “raised threat”, in March 2016.
Police in Norway’s largest cities and at Oslo’s airport will carry weapons until further notice following the attack.
Denmark has been on high alert since the February 2015 shootings.
Neutral Sweden has not fought a war in more than 200 years, but its military has taken part in UN peacekeeping missions in a number of conflict zones in recent years, including Iraq, Mali and Afghanistan.
The Sapo security police said in its annual report it was impossible to say how big a risk there was that Sweden would be targeted like other European cities, but that, if so “it is most likely that it would be undertaken by a lone attacker”.
Terror charges against Antwerp driver dropped
Belgium has dropped terrorism charges against a driver who sped into a crowded shopping area in Antwerp last month, sparking fears of a copy-cat terror attack, prosecutors said yesterday.
However, the driver, a Tunisian man identified as Mohamed R, remains in custody on a weapons offence related to the incident, the federal prosecutor’s office said.
It said a court in the port city of Antwerp had found there was not enough evidence to support a terror charge, in line with a recommendation by the federal prosecutor’s office which investigates terrorist offences.
“The court considers that there is insufficient evidence of violations of the legislation on terrorism,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. “The extension of the detention of the person concerned is only based on violations of the arms legislation.”
The man was arrested March 23 for driving at high speed into the crowded Meir shopping area in Antwerp, forcing people to jump out of the way but causing no injuries.
The authorities said they found a rifle and bladed weapons in the car following his arrest.
The 39-year-old Tunisian was charged March 24 with “an attempt to murder in a terrorist manner, an attempt to hit and wound in a terrorist manner and arms infractions”.
Police officers cordon the truck which crashed into the Ahlens department store at Drottninggatan, in central Stockholm.
