A gunman disguised as a police officer killed at least 10 people at a summer youth camp organised by Norway’s ruling Labour Party on an island on the outskirts of the capital Oslo, state television NRK reported yesterday.
“We have received information on the death of 10 people while seven have been wounded,” police spokesman Bjoern Erik Sem-Jakobsen was quoted as saying by the Nettavisen news website.
“This figure is still not definitive but that is what we have been able to establish so far,” he said.
At Utoeya, the idyllic island in an Oslo fjord, a man disguised as a police officer opened fire with an automatic gun as some 600 young people gathered for a summer school meeting of the ruling Labour Party’s youth branch. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg had at one point been scheduled to attend the event, police said.
“A man in police uniform called young people, telling them: ‘Come here’, and then executed them,” a witness told NRK.
Several of the youngsters tried to escape by jumping in the water.
Several witnesses told Norwegian media the man was of northern European appearance.
A man arrested by the police later yesterday, following the deadly shooting on Utoeya island and the bombing in Oslo, is a Norwegian, Justice Minister Knut Storberget said.
Attacks in Scandinavian countries since 1999
• June 28, 1999: Two journalists and their eight-year-old son are wounded when their car explodes in a Stockholm suburb after they had received death threats from neo-Nazi groups. Three days after the attack, two police officers are seriously wounded in a car bomb explosion in Malmoe in the south while conducting a routine inspection of the vehicle.
• October 11, 2002: Seven people, including the attacker, are killed and more than 80 injured in a suicide bombing attack on a shopping mall in Vantaa, north of the Finnish capital Helsinki. The motives of the bomber, 19-year-old chemistry student Petri Gerdt, remain unknown.
• September 17, 2006: Automatic gunfire is aimed at the façade of a synagogue in Oslo, without claiming any casualties.
Three men are arrested, suspected of also having planned attacks on the US and Israeli embassies in the Norwegian capital.
• December 31, 2008: Two Israelis are shot and injured in a shopping centre in Odense in central Denmark. A Palestinian who said he was expressing anger about the ongoing Middle East conflict, is jailed for 10 years in January 2010.
• September 10, 2010: Lors Dukayev, a Belgian of Chechen origin, plans to attack the Jyllands-Posten paper in revenge for its publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, but the device explodes while he prepares it in a Copenhagen hotel. He is jailed for 12 years.
• December 11, 2010: Taymour Abdulwahab, a 29-year-old whose family fled from Iraq to Sweden in 1991, blows himself up in an empty side-street off Stockholm’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfare, injuring two people.
An Islamist website, Shumukh al-Islam, posts a purported will by Abdulwahab in which he says he is fulfilling a threat by Al-Qaeda in Iraq to attack Sweden for what he terms its war on Islam, notably in Afghanistan.