Eleven lives have been claimed by a tragic shooting at an adult education center in Örebro in central Sweden, making it the deadliest gun incident in the nation’s history. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson described it as a “painful” day for the country.
The police said the gunman was dead, and the school was still being searched for other possible victims. Police did not have a motive for the attack. At a news conference, local police chief Roberto Eid Forest said, “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.”
By evening, the authorities confirmed that eleven people have been killed while the number of the wounded was yet to be established. Forest said the police believed the shooter was a lone operator and at the moment the police were not treating the case as an act of terrorism. The suspected gunman was also not known to police.
The shooting happened at Risbergska school, which is around 200 km west of Stockholm and teaches adults who either did not finish school, or who never had any chance to go. It is colocated with younger students on the same campus. Outside Örebro University Hospital, eye-witnesses emotionally spoke about the anxious waiting for news regarding their family.
One man, Ali Elmokad, said he was concerned about a cousin: “We’ve been trying to get hold of him all day, we haven’t been successful.” A friend who had been in the school described the scene as “terrible,” with injured people lying on the floor.
Investigators continue to comb the crime scene and conducted searches at a number of addresses in Örebro following the tragedy. Witnesses recounted that police presence was heavy, with one resident, Lingam Tuohmaki, saying, “We saw a lot of police with drawn weapons.”
The worst mass shooting in the history of Sweden, Kristersson termed it, was announced with sadness nationwide. “It is hard to take in the full extent of what has happened today – the darkness that now lowers itself across Sweden tonight,” he said.
King Carl XVI Gustav extended words of condolence, echoing that of the grieving nation, while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed sympathy: “In this dark hour, we stand with the people of Sweden.
Maria Pegado, a school teacher, remembered, in chilling detail, the instance when the shooting started. “A person burst into my classroom after lunch and told everybody to run out. I took all my 15 students out into the hallway, and we started running. Then I heard two shots, but we made it out,” she said. She saw others, in their flight, dragging injured persons.
In this country, immigrants make a sizeable presence among adult students eager to update both their educative and occupational experiences with the uptake of Swedish. Gangland shootings and bombings leave Sweden among countries with high levels of lethal violence per capita anywhere in the European Union, while lethal school or educational institutional assaults remain remarkably infrequent. As few as ten people have lost their lives as a result of incidents inside a school within Sweden between 2010 and 2022.
Sweden still has relatively high gun ownership, especially for hunting, but incidents involving illegal firearms have surged significantly in the recent upsurge of gang conflicts. Previous high-profile attacks, including a 2015 assault by a masked gunman motivated by racial hatred and a 2017 truck attack in Stockholm, put in perspective the challenges facing the nation in terms of response to violence.
