Students scattered and found cover. Classrooms were barricaded and corridors became instant crime scenes. One woman used her shawl to try to stop a man next to her from bleeding to death. Another witness told a newspaper that he saw a “bloodbath … the sickest thing I’ve ever seen”.
On Tuesday, one police chief described the scene at Campus Risbergska, an adult education campus in Orebro in central Sweden, as resembling an “inferno”.
Flags are flying at half mast and the following day King Carl XVI Gustaf said: “All of Sweden is mourning.”
The mass shooting was the worst in Swedish history. But it was also another tragic waystation on Sweden’s journey from a peaceful, liberal high-trust society, a paragon of a modern social democratic state, into an increasingly fractious, armed and at times violent country. Orebro is a unique and unparalleled tragedy for Sweden, but it has hit a country already ill at ease with itself.
King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia at a memorial site to honour the victims of the school shooting
JONAS GRATZER
When I visited recently, taking in the capital Stockholm, Sodertalje, an industrial city, and the pretty towns of Mariefred and Sigtuna, almost every conversation came back to two factors: migration and crime.
Swedes, whether they were members of parliament or former gang members, new migrants or natives, talked about segregation, vigilantism and gated communities with a candour and sadness that would have amazed their grandparents.
Materially the country still seemed well-off. But politically it was haywire. The collapse of the Social Democrats, the centre-left party that ruled the country for most of the 20th century, left a void that has been filled by a hard-edged right-wing nationalism. The Sweden Democrats, whose roots are in neo-Nazism, surged in popularity during the 2010s, becoming one of the largest parties in the Riksdag and setting the national political agenda.
• Sweden to demand ‘honest life’ from migrants wanting citizenship
A growing awareness of gang crime shootings and bombings connected with a huge influx of migrants and the burgeoning drugs trade since 2015 had shifted political allegiances. For years the Swedish left had argued that crime was rooted in poverty. But the argument of the Sweden Democrats, that crime was intrinsically connected with migration and integration failures, won over millions of voters.
Over a Guinness in a kitsch Irish pub in Sodertalje, Jan, a 51 year-old who works in a paint shop, said that his town had been transformed. Today it was a “gang town”, he said: a few weeks ago, after a dispute about entry, the pub was shot up by a gunman. “Ten years ago there were no child soldiers,” Jan said. “But now 15 and 16-year-olds are on the front line.” He grimaced. “Sodertalje is not always strawberries and milk.”
Scant information on the killer’s motives has been released by the authorities since the atrocity last week. There are only two hard facts so far: the perpetrator was white Swedish and the school where the shooting took place had a large immigrant student body.
At least 11 people, including seven women, and Rickard Andersson, the suspected gunman, died. Syrians and Bosnians were among the dead, according to embassies of those countries. Six more people were injured.
Andersson, 35, took his own life on Tuesday surrounded by three licensed weapons and unused ammunition. Police initially said the killer did not appear to be motivated by ideology. But on Thursday they appeared to be reconsidering. Anna Bergkvist, the lead investigator, told the BBC: “Why they said that, I cannot comment. We are looking at different motives and we will declare it when we have it.”
Whatever his motive, a roiling culture war about migration, terror, crime and the far right has rocked Sweden since the attack.
“When a white man carries out a massacre, people look for explanations other than terrorism,” wrote Victor Malm, a columnist for the Swedish daily newspaper Expressen on Thursday. “Terrorists are the others.”
“All the violence that happens in today’s Sweden affects innocent people,” Andreas Sundling, a 28- year-old student, who hid from Andersson, told Expressen. “You ask yourself, ‘Can you be safe in today’s Sweden?’”
Orebro, about 120 miles west of Stockholm, is a university town of about 160,000 people and a medieval castle that looms across the river Svartan. It is also a window into radical changes in Sweden over the past 40 years. When the German travel writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger trotted around Sweden for his book Europe, Europe in the 1980s, he called Swedes “world record-holders in docility”.
The country Enzenberger described was modern, peaceful and tolerant, but it was also collectivist and dull. The 1986 assassination of Olof Palme, the prime minister, in a cinema was shocking not least for the rarity of a gun murder in Stockholm (Palme did not even have security).
Olaf Palme’s murder has never been definitively solved
AFP
Like other Scandinavian nations, for decades Sweden was characterised by high levels of social and political trust. Its economic success was led by a series of innovative companies such as Volvo, Ikea, Tetra Pak and Ericsson. Sweden’s welfare state, the Folkhemmet (people’s home) was one of the most extensive and generous in the world. In 2005, The Guardian described Sweden as “the most successful society the world has ever known”.
Things are somewhat different today. In August 2023, the paper visited Orebro to find that “guns are so easy to come by that social services say most of the high-risk young people they work with in relation to youth crime could get hold of one in a day”. Children as young as ten were wielding them as gang wars intensified in the illegal drugs trade.
Guns, which are strictly licensed by the state, were relatively rare in Sweden before the 2010s. Gun murders were even rarer. In the early 2000s the number of annual gun murders in the country was in single digits and one of the lowest in Europe.
• Welcome to Sweden’s gang wars, where children carry guns and bombs
But in recent years, Sweden, with a population of ten million, is third after Montenegro and Albania for the highest number of gun murders per 100,000 inhabitants in Europe. Police say that illegal firearms are trafficked into Sweden from the western Balkans. Many of these weapons, along with drugs, are sold to gangs.
And the guns are being used. In 2024 there were 296 shootings in Sweden, which resulted in the deaths of 44 people and injuries to 66 people, police data shows. The record for the highest number of shootings was in 2022 when 391 shootings took place across Sweden. Some 62 people died and 107 were injured.
Guns are also central to the debate after the deaths in Orebro. Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT suggested that Andersson used a hunting rifle, while Swedish Radio said police had listed the weapon as an automatic firearm. Later reports suggested all four of his weapons were licensed hunting rifles.
Anyone over the age of 18 without a criminal record can apply for a permit for a shotgun, handgun or semi-automatic rifle. But in the wake of the shooting, Sweden’s centre-right coalition government has announced plans to put tougher controls on gun ownership, including tightened vetting procedures and the reversal of a 2023 reform that allowed for the purchase of the AR-15, an assault rifle used in many American school shootings.
Sweden is caught in a “perfect storm”, the security analyst Magnus Ranstorp told me. There are at least 30,000 gang criminals, forming a “violent extremist milieu”. He contrasted Sweden with neighbouring Denmark, home to just 1,500 serious criminals.
A fear of conflict has led successive Swedish governments to ignore the storm, Ranstorp said. “Sweden is a consensus-oriented society. We didn’t want to see reality staring us in the face.”
Further heightening a sense of division and unease, on January 30, Salwan Momika, an Iraqi Christian activist who sparked violent protests after burning the Quran in Stockholm in 2023 was shot dead. The killing does not appear to be gang-related. It did, however, yet again underline the ease with which firearms could be found for targeted killings in Sweden.
“With the murder of Salwan Momika, the Quran burnings and riots, the bombings, the shootings and now this mass murder,” wrote the author Ivar Arpi on Thursday, “the image of the country is becoming increasingly difficult to explain.”