Sweden’s government has announced plans to strengthen its gun laws, including by restricting access to semi-automatic weapons, after the country’s worst mass shooting.
On Tuesday, a gunman killed 10 people at an education centre in Örebro, west of Stockholm, before shooting himself. Police have not said what type of weapon he used but they have said he had a licence to own four weapons, three of which were found beside him.
“The horrific act of violence in Örebro raises several key questions about gun legislation,” the centre-right coalition government, which relies on the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats, said. As well as tightening legislation, it said it wanted to improve the way that people considered “medically unsuitable” for weapons possession were reported.
“We have to ensure that only the right people have guns in Sweden,” Ulf Kristersson, Sweden’s prime minister, said during a visit to Latvia.
On Friday police said identification was complete and that seven women and four men aged between 31 and 68 had died. They have not yet named the victims or the perpetrator, nor given the victims’ nationalities.
The Guardian understands that the victims include a Syrian man, an Eritrean woman and an Iranian woman. Police are investigating whether the shooting was racially motivated.
Swedish hunters, of whom there are hundreds of thousands, are able to apply for licences for semi-automatic weapons. In August 2023, the environmental protection agency lifted a ban on military-style models, meaning guns such as the AR-15 were permitted for hunting.
The government said on Friday it wanted to reimpose restrictions that existed before 2023 and develop a strategy to seize military-style weapons. “The AR-15 is an example of a weapon that is compatible with large magazines and can cause a lot of damage in a short time,” it said.
The government said a recent report found that several of the requirements that should be taken into account when assessing a person’s suitability for a weapons permit were not clearly stated in weapons regulations, and that they should be set out in law. These include age, knowledge, skills, certain medical factors and how law-abiding a person is.
It also plans to add provisions on doctors’ reporting obligations in relation to weapons and the police’s ability to revoke permits.
The main opposition party, the Social Democrats, welcomed the government’s announcement but called for all weapons licences to be reviewed. It also said there should be a review of how registers between authorities were cross-checked.
The decision has attracted public criticism from several high-profile Sweden Democrats.
The Syrian embassy in Stockholm has said its citizens were among the dead.
The suspect, who apparently killed himself, has been named in media reports as Rickard Andersson, 35, a former student of the school, who lived locally. He is understood to have attended maths classes at the school a few years ago and had been unemployed for a decade.
Among the victims was Salim Iskef, 28, who phoned his fiancee, Kareen Elia, 24, from the school and told her he had been shot. “He called me and said: ‘I’ve been shot, they shot us.’ He said he loves me and that’s the last thing I heard,” she said in an interview.
Mr Iskef, who fled the war in Syria 10 years ago, was studying care and was soon to sit his exams, while working as a carer for elderly people. Members of their church said there was standing room only at a memorial service for Mr Iskef on Thursday night.
Fr Jacob Kasselia, a priest at St Maria Örebro, the Syrian Orthodox church attended by Iskef, said the community was reeling. “We have our doors open for everybody. You can see that everybody is affected. A dark cloud has come over us all. But despite that we say that we must look for the light,” he said.
Fr Kasselia said he knew of two others who had been killed. One, he said, was a woman from Eritrea, who looked after her four children alone, and the other was a middle-aged woman from Iran.
The number of non-Swedish victims would affect Örebro and the whole country, said Fr Kasselia, who went to the remembrance service attended by the prime minister and the king and queen on Wednesday. “It is dark over us all.”
The Bosnian Islamic Community in Örebro said the organisation had been advised to increase security since the shootings and had hired security guards to watch the mosque.
Elia Xincher, 20, a student and member of a Syrian Orthodox church young people’s association, said many of its members went to Campus Risbergska to improve their grades so they could go to university or increase their employment prospects.
Some of his friends had been forced to hide in a classroom during the attack. “I saw one of them yesterday and still to this day she is shaking,” he said. “You cannot forget about it for your whole life.” – Guardian
