KONGSBERG, Norway, (Reuters) – A 37-year-old Danish citizen who had converted to Islam is suspected of killing five people with a bow-and-arrow and other weapons in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg in a rare incident of mass killing in Norway, police said today.
The five people, four women and one man, were between 50 and 70 years old. Two people, including an off-duty police officer, were wounded in the Wednesday evening attacks.
The suspect, who has not been identified, had converted to Islam and police had been worried about signs of his radicalisation, regional police chief Ole Bredrup Saeverud told a news conference.
It was too early to determine whether the attacks should be investigated as an act of terrorism, he said.
“There were concerns over radicalisation … Those reports were followed up,” Saeverud said without elaborating.
The suspect lived in Kongsberg, which is 68 km (42 miles) southwest of the capital, Oslo, and has a population of about 28,000 people.
The death toll was the worst of any attack in Norway since 2011, when far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, most of them teenagers at a youth camp.
Images from one of the crime scenes showed an arrow that appeared to be stuck in the wall of a wood-panelled building.
Police first received reports of a man carrying a bow and arrow at 1612 GMT on Wednesday. He was first observed by a police unit a few minutes later but managed to escape.
The man fired arrows at the police and he was only apprehended after a hunt of about 35 minutes.
“It is likely that all the killings took place after the first police sighting of him,” Saeverud said.
The suspect is in custody and is believed to have acted alone. He was cooperating with police and had implicated himself in the attacks, although he has not entered a plea.
“He is admitting to the facts of the case,” police attorney Ann Iren Svane Mathiassen told news agency NTB.
“We’ll have to see if he also pleads guilty,” she later told private broadcaster TV2.
The suspect’s lawyer, Fredrik Neumann, told public broadcaster NRK: “He is cooperating and is giving detailed statements regarding this event.”