By Johan Ahlander and Simon Johnson
OREBRO, Sweden (Reuters) -Swedish police found three rifles near the body of the gunman amid a chaotic scene they described as an “inferno” after 11 people were killed and several wounded in the country’s deadliest mass shooting, officials said on Thursday.
Police believe the suspected killer – identified by a Reuters source and Swedish media as Rickard Andersson, a 35-year-old unemployed recluse – acted alone in Tuesday’s attack on an educational campus in Orebro.
Law enforcement officials told a press conference the suspected attacker had a firearms licence for four weapons, three of which were found next to him when police located his body.
“The police who arrived at the scene have spoken about what could be described as an inferno … dead people and injured people, screams and smoke,” Orebro police chief Lars Wiren said.
Police found 10 empty ammunition magazines and a “large amount” of unused ammunition. Wiren said police arrived on the scene five minutes after the alarm was raised and believed the attacker then began directing his fire towards them.
“After approximately one hour, the acute operation was over when the suspected perpetrator was found dead with several weapons near him,” Wiren said.
Police said the smoke was not caused by fire but of “some sort of pyrotechnics”. Several police had to seek medical attention for inhaling smoke.
Sweden has a high level of gun ownership by European standards, mainly linked to hunting, though it is much lower than in the United States. A wave of gang crime in recent years has also highlighted the high incidence of illegal weapons.
The attack took place at the Risbergska adult education centre in Orebro, a city of more than 100,000 people some 200 km (125 miles) west of Stockholm.
Swedish authorities have said there was no evidence so far that the shooter, who was among the 11 dead after likely taking his own life, had “ideological motives”.
The police have not confirmed the name of the suspect and the number of wounded remains unclear, two days after the attack at the school, which offers adult courses and Swedish language classes for immigrants.
BARRICADED IN CLASSROOMS
While Sweden has suffered a wave of gun violence in recent years related to gang crime, the nation has been shocked by the brutality of Tuesday’s crime.
Survivors barricaded themselves in classrooms and hid under beds to escape the killer. When they were released by police, they spoke of seeing pools of blood where victims had been shot. Police are still working to formally identify the dead.
“There is still a lot of work to be done there and not everyone has been definitively identified,” a police spokesperson said. “There are formalities for that.”
While police have yet to disclose the identities of the victims, the Syriac-Orthodox church in Orebro said on Facebook one of its members, a man, was among the dead in the shooting.
Many students in Sweden’s adult school system are immigrants seeking qualifications to help them find jobs in the Nordic country, while also learning Swedish.
The Campus Risbergska school has around 2,700 pupils, around 800 of whom were enrolled in Swedish for Immigrants courses, according to information provided by the local authority.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who called the attack a “dark day” for Sweden, is holding a regular gathering of the government on Thursday and has invited all the opposition parties to attend in a show of political unity.
Unlike in many countries, access to schools in Sweden is generally not tightly controlled. Speaking to Swedish Radio, School Minister Lotta Edholm, said that should change.
“I think that schools, exactly like most other workplaces, should in fact be locked and that it should be the head of the school who decides who can come in,” she said.
(Reporting by Johan Ahlander in Orebro, Simon Johnson in Stockholm and Essi Lehto in Helsinki; writing by Niklas Pollard; Editing by Alex Richardson)
