2nd suspect arrested as Swedish police reveal 1st sought asylum
Print Edition
THE Stockholm truck attack suspect from Uzbekistan was a rejected asylum-seeker who eluded authorities’ attempts to deport him by giving police a wrong address, Swedish police said yesterday while announcing the arrest of a second suspect.
Jan Evensson of the Stockholm police told a televised news conference that the 39-year-old suspect’s request for a residence permit was rejected in June 2016 but police could not find him to send him back to his native country because he was not at the address he had given. On February 24, he was formally sought after by Swedish police.
“We know he has been sympathetic to extremist organizations,” said Jonas Hysing of Sweden’s national police. He declined to name the suspect, who had been arrested within hours of Friday’s attack on shoppers in Stockholm.
Swedish prosecutors yesterday arrested a second person in connection with the truck attack and were holding four other people.
“A person suspected of terrorist offenses by murder has been arrested,” spokeswoman Karin Rosander said. She gave no further details.
Evensson said authorities had questioned over 500 people in the investigation so far.
The four people killed on Friday were a British man, a Belgian woman and two Swedes.
Belgian news agency Belga said the Belgian woman had been reported missing and was identified by her identity papers and later by DNA testing.
Ten of the 15 people wounded in the truck attack remained in hospital yesterday, including one child. Stockholm county spokesman Patrik Soderberg said four of the 10 were considered “seriously” injured and the remaining six, including the child, were slightly hurt.
One of the wounded, an 83-year-old Romanian woman who was begging on the city’s pedestrian Drottninggatan shopping street when the attack took place, said she was “surprised” that passersby helped her.
“I thought everyone would run past me and save themselves,” said Papusa Ciuraru, whose foot was crushed by a boulder displaced by the speeding truck.
Speaking from her hospital bed, she said she “thought a war was going on” because “people around me were screaming.”
The lion-shaped boulders on Drottninggatan are meant as roadblocks and have been put up in several European capitals after a truck attack last year killed 12 people at a Christmas market in Berlin.
Ciuraru said she “tried to get up and run but got a huge rock over my leg.”
Meanwhile, the department store that was rammed by the stolen truck apologized for an announcement that it would reopen to sell damaged goods at a “reduced price.”
The Ahlens department store said its motivation “was born out of the idea of standing up for transparency and not allowing evil forces take control of our lives.”
The store said it would reopen today “without any damaged goods.”
A fire broke out after the truck smashed into its entrance but was quickly extinguished.
Stockholm officials, meanwhile, moved thousands of flowers at a makeshift memorial to a nearby square after a fence outside the department store was overwhelmed with tributes and threatened to collapse.
The fence had been put up to keep people away from the broken glass and twisted metal at the attack site, and to allow forensic experts and police to gather evidence.
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