Explosions that killed a suspected bomber and injured two passersby on a busy shopping street in Stockholm are being investigated as a “terrorist crime,” sending shock waves through Sweden, which prides itself on its open, peaceful society and had so far been untouched by the post-9/11 attacks.
“We’ve been a sheltered bay in a stormy world,” said Magnus Ranstorp, research director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College. “We have even seen ourselves as a moral guardian for the world. Innocence lost is a good way to describe what has happened now.”
Though Sweden elevated its security threat level in the fall, its cities have been spared the kind of bombings experienced elsewhere in Europe such as in London and Madrid. Sweden has largely abstained from the military conflicts and alliances that have defined the continent and has a legacy of “decades of uncontentious foreign policy,” Dr. Ranstorp said.
But things are rapidly changing in the country of 9.3 million. With one of the most open immigration policies in Europe, Sweden has struggled to integrate a growing Muslim population after accepting more immigrants from Iraq than any other Western country since the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
A recent election redrew the country’s political map, giving the far-right Sweden Democrats 20 seats in Parliament. The anti-immigration party’s leader Jimmie Akesson has described the growing number of Muslims – about 5 per cent of the country’s population – as the biggest external threat to Sweden since the Second World War.
“Certainly Sweden isn’t any longer the island of peace and wealth that we thought it was,” said Olof Ruin, professor emeritus of political science at Stockholm University. “We maybe naively thought we were outside these problems. But of course we are not. We are part of tendencies affecting Europe as a whole, the world as a whole.”
Before the blasts on Saturday, the news organization TT received threatening e-mails about the country’s military presence in Afghanistan and Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks’s drawings of the Prophet Mohammad. The e-mail was also addressed to Saepo, the Swedish intelligence agency.
About 10 minutes later, a parked car exploded into flames on Drottninggatan, a main shopping hub, filling the packed street with thick black smoke. Authorities later said gas canisters were found inside the vehicle.
A second blast occurred minutes later on a small side street about 200 metres away. A man was spotted on the ground at the site of the second blast, with blood flowing from his stomach.
The man was carrying six pipe bombs and a backpack full of nails, though only one of those bombs detonated, according to the Swedish daily Aftonbladet. Witnesses told the newspaper the man was shouting in a language they believed was Arabic.
At a news conference, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt urged Swedes not to jump to “premature conclusions” that “create tension which paints pictures that are then difficult to change.”
“Sweden is an open society ... which has stated a wish that people should be able to have different backgrounds, believe in different gods ... and live side by side in our open society.”
He said police had yet to confirm a link between the explosions, the dead man and the threatening e-mails. “The prosecutor and the police are phrasing this as a suspected terrorist crime,” he told reporters.
Swedish prosecutor Tomas Lindstrand said police are “98 per cent” certain the suicide bomber was a 28-year-old Swedish citizen, Taimour Abdulwahab, who also lived several years in Britain.
An Islamist website also identified him. “It is our brother, mujahid Taymour Abdel Wahab, who carried out the martyrdom operation in Stockholm,” the website Shumukh al-Islam said, together with a photograph of a man in dark glasses and Western clothes. A Saepo spokesperson refused to comment on the claim.
Local media widely referred to the dead man as a suicide bomber, though police have yet to confirm this or suggest a motive. Such an attack would be the first in Sweden’s history, intelligence officials said.
The threatening e-mail was accompanied by recordings of a man’s voice in both Swedish and Arabic, said the news agency TT. The man criticized Sweden’s contribution of 500 troops to the U.S.-led NATO force in Afghanistan. He also referenced Mr. Vilks, the Swedish artist whose cartoons depicted the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog in 2007, drawing outrage from Muslims who consider it blasphemous to create images of Mohammed and consider dogs ritually unclean.
“Our actions will speak for themselves, as long as you do not end your war against Islam and humiliation of the Prophet and your stupid support for the pig Vilks,” TT quoted the man as saying in one recording.
Dr. Ranstorp, who has studied terrorism in Europe for 20 years, said it was doubtful the bomber acted alone.
“Rarely do you have complete loners,” he said. “There are usually agents of influence. You have the car bomb issue, the suicide mission and then the propaganda. Had it just been one perhaps it wouldn’t be so likely or so probable.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
