Norwegian pilots land plane after axe attack, in Oslo in Norway, January 20, 2016. REUTERS/Torstein Hjortdal
While the attack did not involve an actual axe, it showed that Sweden’s domestic intelligence agency had failed to predict the kind of violence unleashed on the streets of Oslo.
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“We we?? ?re just watching Oslo on Sunday evening and heard a very long scream,” a witness named Johan told local media. “I turned out my TV and saw a group of youths running away, screaming at people, attacking them with sticks, sticks. All I could do was keep watching.”
The police are investigating whether the attack was the work of Islamist militants, but some have suggested that Swedish authorities, which have been increasingly accused of lax security on a busy night, were the main culprits.
“The police have to go into these neighborhoods – they have to put the security up in these places… it’s not possible to get people on the street when the attack has just taken place, because of the police,” Gustaf, a shopkeeper in the nearby village of Utoeya told Reuters by telephone.
The police and the Norwegian Defense Force are on high alert for a potential terror attack – Sweden was at least partially hit by a bomb which exploded in the country on January 11, 2016 – as is Sweden’s army, and have been on high alert since January.
Norway’s prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Monday that a man dressed in a black military uniform, armed with an axe and wearing a ski mask, had entered a police station with the intent of driving the police boat across to the city.
The suspect, who was shot and killed, was one of hundreds of suspected Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) recruits suspected of attending foreign terror training in Norway in 2015 and 2016, according to the security service.
Rasmussen said on Monday that the suspect had been part of a group o?????f 12 Swedish citizens who had been training in Ir??? ???aq and Syria, where ISIL now controls substantial territory.
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