Örebro School Shooting 2025
Oisín Cantwell
News Columnist
This is a commentary text. Analysis and positions are those of the writer.
Published 2025-02-04 22.24
ÖREBRO. Sweden's first school shooting is the worst mass murder in modern Swedish history.
Roberto Eid Forest, police chief in Örebro, confirmed the information that had been circulating all afternoon, that the crime was much worse than the previous reports claimed, at a press conference that began at 6 pm.
"A dozen dead". There is a terrible reason why this police officer was vague, people are fighting for their lives in the hospital, the number could grow.
A brutal act against innocent people, a nightmare, my words are not enough.
Journalists crowded into a small room that looked like it was from the 1970s, but which was actually inaugurated in 2013 along with the rest of this Justice Center, a complex where the police station is combined with the prosecutor's office, the detention center and the district court.
The police chief did not have much to say about the massacre and the perpetrator, it is early in the investigation, much is still unclear, hopefully a lot will be clarified tomorrow.
There is still a lot we do not know about the tragedy, which does not prevent us from knowing a lot.
For example, Sweden has had its first school shooting. Sure, murders have happened before in Swedish schools, right-wing extremist Anton Lundin Pettersson killed three people in Trollhättan, an 18-year-old murdered two teachers in Malmö, but it was with a knife.
It was really only a matter of time before a massacre of the kind that has affected a long list of other countries in the Western world would also occur in Sweden.
A country that has had its fair share of heinous crime, two ministerial assassinations, a fatal gun violence among young men that tops the EU statistics, terrorist acts, explosions...
That this country would forever be spared from a school shooting is less likely. Rather, it was expected that the violence would move into the school.
Although we know a bit about the perpetrator. Journalists have dug up what the police did not want to tell, or perhaps did not have time to find out.
The suspect's characteristics follow an international pattern: a sly figure, socially isolated, exclusion, mental problems, suicide after the bloodbath.
While all this and other information was being gathered by journalists, worried parents gathered outside the Risbergska campus and relatives whose lives had been shattered and who would never be the same again sought out the hospital for information and support.
And a sense of unreality set in.
At a first press conference in the afternoon, the police were strangely vague, talking about five injured people, but even then there was credible information about many dead.
A sense of unreality that I remember from that evening many years ago when Ensign Mattias Flink murdered seven people in Falun.
I was a young temporary worker at Aftonbladet, even then we knew that people had died, but it took a long time for the police to confirm.
That massacre has been considered the worst in modern Swedish history. It was until February 4, 2025.
And in Stockholm, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Minister of Justice Gunnar Strömmer called a press conference this evening and did their best to put into words a tragedy that cannot be described in words, a tragedy that only those affected can understand the full meaning of.
About an hour earlier, in the small room in the police station in Örebro, a police chief with friendly but sad eyes did his best to summarize the situation.
Roberto Eid Forest patiently answered questions from TV and radio and newspapers about the state of the investigation and explained that motives are to be investigated and talked about security-creating efforts and when the stressed reporters were finished after 45 minutes and hurried off to write their texts and edit their stories, I lingered.
It has been a long and dark day's journey towards evening and the policeman said that he does not know how many hours he has left to work.
He says he became a police officer because he wanted to help people.
Graduated in 2002, many years in external service, dog handler, almost his entire career in Örebro, manager in various positions for almost a decade.
Notable crimes have come and gone, gang murders, the Easter riots, drug raids.
But nothing like the massacre on the Risbergska campus.
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