Risbergska School in the city of Örebro, some 125 miles west of Stockholm, was the scene of a horrific mass shooting, with police saying "about 10 people" were killed by an "automatic" weapon and many more wounded.
Roberto Eid Forest, the district chief of police in Örebro, was unable to confirm the exact number of dead, given the large number of wounded.
Risbergska School has about 2,000 students and "was previously a high school, but is now also used for adult education and for teaching Swedish to immigrants through a government program known as SFI," according to The Telegraph.
Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson says it's the "worst mass shooting in Sweden's history."
Carl Gustav, king of Sweden, called the shooting a "terrible atrocity."
“With sadness and dismay, my family and I have received the information about the terrible atrocity in Örebro,” the king said. “We send our condolences tonight to the families and friends of the deceased. Our thoughts at this time also go to the injured and their relatives, as well as to others affected.”
Sweden has been plagued by gang violence in recent years, an outgrowth of their catastrophic immigration policies. Three days ago, Salwan Momika, a former Iraqi militia leader on trial in Sweden for burning a Koran, was shot dead in Stockholm.
First reports say the school attacker was of Syrian origin. Authorities claim the assailant was unknown to police and had no ties to terrorism. They also claim the weapon involved was an automatic weapon.
Syrian immigrants don't have access to automatic weapons in Sweden. Indeed, no one does. Was this another instance of gang violence in a country where Kristersson was forced to admit that the government had "lost control" of the situation? That he's in denial is obvious.
"This is Sweden’s inherited problem. They have grown over a very long time," said Kristersson. "That we do not have control over the wave of violence is quite obvious," he added.
Immigrants with automatic rifles are new. School shootings are new. They have not "grown over a very long time." That's utter nonsense.
Sweden has the EU's highest rate of brutal gun violence per capita in 2023. In the last month of 2024, 40 people have been shot dead in Sweden -- a chilling number for a European country of only 10-million people, according to a Reuters report.
Gangs are not new to Sweden. It has seen violent gang rivalries between gangs like Los Bandidos and Hells Angels since the 90s. These gangs could be easily identified because of their members' sunglasses, leather jackets and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
But the older gang wars look like an "age of innocence", in comparison to now, reported The UK Express.
The new gangs are made up of immigrants from the Middle East and Balkan nations. The violence has become deadlier and lot more frequent.
Criminologist Ardavan Khoshnood, an associate professor at Lund University, traces the gang violence to the turn of this century.
"At the beginning of the 2000s, we started witnessing more street gangs and more ethnic criminal groups. They mainly started to grow in areas we call ‘vulnerable’ with a lot of unemployment, low education, and socio-economic status. Today, criminals have taken over that society to quite a high degree. When these gangs started to come to power they developed different territories and got very quickly deep into drug trafficking," said Khoshnood.
Ordinarily, I reserve judgment on the perpetrators of these mass killings. But the fact that an automatic weapon was used at a school instructing immigrants, combined with Sweden's recent gang violence, strongly suggests that an escalating gang war is at work.
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