A suicide bomber who blew himself up in Stockholm at the weekend was carrying a cocktail of explosives and probably meant to wreak carnage among Christmas shoppers, investigators said yesterday.
As police searched the father-of-three’s home near London, Sweden’s chief prosecutor confirmed investigators believed the bomber was a Swedish citizen who now lived in Britain, and was bent on killing “as many people as possible”.
Taymour Abdelwahab, the suicide bomber behind twin weekend blasts in Stockholm, was described yesterday as an ordinary, friendly young man who underwent a drastic radicalisation after moving to Britain to study.
Sweden’s top prosecutor “confirmed 98 per cent” that “the man who blew himself up” in a busy pedestrian quarter of the Swedish capital following a car explosion, was Mr Abdelwahab.
The Al-Qaeda-linked website Shumukh al-Islam named him as the bomber on Sunday, saying he had “carried out the martyrdom operation in Stockholm.”
Media reports said that Mr AbdelWahab, who was born in Iraq but became a Swedish citizen in 1992, staged the attack on the eve of his 29th birthday.
He had lived in Britain for a number of years, prosecutor Tomas Lindstrand said, adding that his wife and three children still lived there.
Reports in Britain said his wife Mona, known as Umm Amira, runs a company called Amira Makeup and Hair which offers services including bridal make-up and hair styling.
When he was about 10, Mr Abdelwahab and his family reportedly fled war-torn Iraq to settle in Tranaas, population 18,000, some 200 kilometres south of Stockholm.
“He was just like any other young man. He loved life, he had lots of friends and was out and partied just like anyone else,” acquaintance and Tranaas resident Jean Jalabian said.
“He drank alcohol and had girlfriends. It’s really strange that he would do something like that,” Ms Jalabian said.
But Mr Abdelwahab drastically changed when he left Sweden in 2001 to complete a bachelor’s degree in sports physiotherapy at the University of Luton – now the University of Bedfordshire – from which he graduated in 2004.
He became interested in radical Islam in the town just north of London, where he met his wife, reportedly the same age as him and also with Swedish nationality.
“He got to know an Egyptian imam at the mosque in Luton,” a friend of the family said, adding that during his time there “he became another person. It’s hard to say how. He changed and became more restrictive.”
When he returned to Sweden in 2005, he had a beard, cut contact with his old friends and led a withdrawn life. He never settled back into Swedish life and went back to Britain, only sporadically visiting his family in Tranaas.
He was also searching for a new wife “who accepts Allah’s religion and who is not against me having another wife” on a Muslim contact website.
In a threat he sent Swedish news agency TT and intelligence agency Saepo, Abdelwahab asked his family for forgiveness for lying to them.
“I never went to the Middle East to work or make money,” he said. “I went there for jihad.”
“It wouldn’t have been possible to tell you who I really was. It wasn’t very easy to live the last four years with the secret of being ... as you call it, a terrorist,” he said.