11 people killed in Sweden school campus shooting, says Swedish Police
Swedish police have reported that 11 people, including the suspected gunman, were killed in a shooting at an education center in central Sweden.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson called the incident, which occurred on Tuesday at Risbergska School in Örebro, about 200km (124 miles) west of Stockholm, “the worst mass shooting in Swedish history.”
According to police, the suspect is among the deceased and is believed to have acted alone.
While the motive remains unclear, authorities have ruled out any “ideological” intent.
Speaking at an evening news conference, Kristersson said, “It is difficult to grasp the magnitude of what has happened today.”
Authorities initially warned that the death toll might rise as several individuals had sustained injuries.
By Wednesday morning, police confirmed the exact number of injured individuals was still unknown.
The shooting was first reported at 12:33 local time (11:44 GMT) at Risbergska School, an adult education center located on a campus that houses multiple schools.
The center is primarily attended by individuals who have not completed primary or secondary education.
Following the incident, students in nearby schools were instructed to stay indoors as a precaution. Örebro police chief Roberto Eid Forest urged the public to avoid the area, saying, “We don’t want members of the public to go there.”
Sweden’s justice minister, who joined the prime minister on Tuesday evening, expressed condolences to those affected by the tragedy and assured citizens that schools across the country would be safe to reopen on Wednesday.
“[I’ve] never seen a school shooting of this magnitude,” Gunnar Strommer said.
Nearby hospitals had cleared their emergency rooms and intensive care units to free up space for patients, local media reported.
Orebro University Hospital said five people injured by gunshot wounds were treated at its emergency room. An additional sixth person, not injured by a gun, had “minor injuries” treated, it said.
No children were among the people being treated there, the municipality for Orebro County said in an update.
Teacher Lena Warenmark told SVT, Swedish public radio, she heard around 10 gunshots close to her study.
Ali el Mokad, a relative of a man who is believed to have been studying at the school at the time of the attack, had positioned himself outside of a local hospital waiting to hear on his relatives’ condition.
“It doesn’t feel very good actually,” Mr Mokad told Reuters news agency. He said that his cousin also knew someone at the school, and when she called her friend earlier, “she fell to the ground because she was crying so much”.
“She thought what she saw was so terrible. She only saw people lying on the floor, injured and blood everywhere,” Mr Mokad said, describing the scene his cousin’s friend had witnessed.
Another witness, a student at the school, who gave only her first name, Marwa, described a difficult scene in which she and several others tried to save a person’s life.
“A guy next to me was shot in the shoulder. He was bleeding a lot. When I looked behind me I saw three people on the floor bleeding,” she told TV4 Sweden.
Marwa and another friend tried to help the injured person by wrapping a shawl around the man’s shoulder “so that he wouldn’t bleed so much”.
“Everyone was so shocked.”
Prime Minister Kristersson remarked on how Tuesday was “a very painful day for all in Sweden” as he shared that those who had a “normal school day” replaced “with terror” are all in his thoughts.
“Being confined to a classroom with fear for your own life is a nightmare that no one should have to experience,” Kristersson said in a post on X.
He later asked people to give police the freedom and the space they need to do their work and investigations, as he also stressed that there was no further risks to attending school the next day.