HS in Norway Kongsberg’s bow striker showed up at the mosque years ago to tell his message to the world, “I quickly realized he needed help.”

Kongsberg

Thursday night Oussama Tlili realized the connection: the suspect of the Kongsberg bow attack had said those words to him earlier.

Norwegian media had filmed a video countless times on Thursday that the man, suspected of a bow attack, posted on Youtube in 2017.

In the video, the man talks about the warning and says that now is the last moment to reconcile his actions. In addition, he says he is a Muslim.

Police had previously said they were concerned about the radicalization of a man who had converted to a Muslim.

In such a situation, the interest is in the only mosque in the city.

“Yesterday was a long day,” Oussama Tlili says Friday at the Islamic Center in downtown Kongsberg.

Mosque the official wooden building is located next to Kongsberg Railway Station. Tlili volunteers as the director of a rotating center.

During Thursday, he has told the Norwegian and international media about his encounters with a 37-year-old man suspected of a bow attack. The suspect visited the mosque 4-5 years ago a few times.

In the evening, Tlili saw the video and is now thinking that perhaps the suspect sought help from the mosque to get his message through.

“Four to five years ago, he came here, said he was a Muslim and that he has a message for the world,” Tlili says.

“I asked him what the message was, but he couldn’t tell me more. I quickly realized he needed help. He saw it on his face. Very quickly I also realized that he knew nothing about Islam, not even the basics. And he didn’t want to talk about Islam. He didn’t talk much. ”

Tlili believes that perhaps declaring himself a Muslim was a way for a suspect to express hatred towards society because “Islam is negatively stigmatized”.

“It was certainly also a cry for help that I couldn’t properly interpret. These things only come to mind afterwards. ”

Eventually, Tlili also lost contact with the man. This disappeared and no longer returned to the mosque.

“This is a terrible tragedy.”

In a small The city of Kongsberg is now wondering what actually happened on Wednesday and how the events could have been prevented.

The candles brought to the downtown memorial site flutter in the cool autumn wind. The townspeople stand quietly on the spot. In the background a roaring rapids, past a yellow robot bus.

Kongsberg is a small town of just 27,000 inhabitants, known for its high-tech jobs, beautiful nature and legend of downhill jumping Birger from Ruud, which now has a candlelight sea next to a statue depicting a lofty aerial flight.

The city also houses the huge defense industry company Kongsberg, which owns almost half of the Finnish Patria.

On Wednesday The 37-year-old Danish citizen, who has lived all his life in Norway, killed five people in the attack, which also injured three people.

Norwegian police said on Friday that nothing in the act suggests plannedness, but in the past, police had also raised the possibility of an act of terrorism. According to police, it has been aware of the radicalization of the suspect.

The terrorist motive is still being investigated, but now police believe the bloodshed is due to the perpetrator’s mental illness.

Read more: Norwegian police: The author of the bow attack is probably the author’s illness

The man had killed his victims by, among other things, breaking into their homes. He had a variety of weapons, but the most attention has been given to the bow gun he aimed at and fired at people.

One of the injured was a police officer who spent his free time and was shot with an arrow in his back. Police survived the shooting.

HS met In Kongsberg, a friend of the police who did not want to be named in public because of the sensitivity of the case.

A friend showed HS the videos he had filmed during the evening. The videos show, among other things, an arrow on the back of a police officer and a suspect surrendering to the police, who walks with his hands up calmly towards the police.

“The perpetrator was no terrorist. He was sick, ”a friend of the police says.

“Many here knew who he was. He just didn’t get help. ”

Suspect indeed, the city had a familiar face. The taxi driver says he often saw him wandering the streets at night because he had not been admitted to restaurants or nightclubs.

To the Norwegian media, neighbors have told the man he behaved threateningly: on a crumbling street to people and his men.

Police were aware of, among other things, the death threat the man had inflicted on his father. According to a close circle, the man was a ticking time bomb and would have needed mental health care.

Size lived in Kongsberg Maja Løchen, 16, says his cousin is working at a Coop store where the suspect had threatened people with a bow gun on Wednesday.

“He often went to my cousin’s checkout and behaved strangely. He asked his cousin for a date, which we found strange because he was such a much older man. ”

Løchen is part of a group of health students who have come to the memorial to lay candles.

“This has affected us all,” says the group’s English teacher Kari Anne Kveseth.

Some of his students were in town when the bloodshed took place. There were many rumors circulating in the air, and information was conveyed in Snapchat, among others.

Many students have later said they were very scared. Memories of the Utøya attack in 2011 also came to mind.

“Some of the students said they thought something similar was happening now. They immediately connected this and Utøya, even though they are so young that they have no direct memory of what happened. ”

Norwegian Wednesday’s suspected terrorist attack was a dramatic and exceptional event with far-reaching consequences, says crisis psychologist Freja Ulvestad Kärki.

He works as a project manager in the Norwegian Board of Health, where he is responsible for the psychosocial monitoring of vulnerable groups in crises, major accidents and disasters.

“Nothing like this has happened in Norway since Utøya,” Ulvestad Kärki describes Wednesday’s bloodshed.

The terrorist attack, which resulted in five deaths, was Norway’s most serious act of terrorism since the Utøya attacks, which became ten years later this year. Freja Ulvestad Kärki has been responsible for the psychosocial monitoring of relatives of Utøya victims for ten years.

Read more: When a serious crisis strikes, the telephone of a Finn living in Norway rings

According to Ulvestad Kärje, the act of terror in Kongsberg activates the same emotions in people as after Utøya.

“People are kind of being thrown back in history. It is easy to think that this type of case, where many people are systematically killed, would be a unique case. That once it happened, the same thing would not happen again. ”

Ulvestad Kärki has met all the survivors of Utøya and the relatives of the victims, with whom he has worked on the traumas caused by the terrorist attack. The relatives of those who died on the island will gather again this month to go through the case.

“Wednesday’s attack is certainly one of the themes.”

This the week was to be a celebration of democracy in Norway.

The country’s new government began its work on Thursday. The resigning prime minister Erna Sohlberg offered a bouquet of flowers and a hug to his follower Jonas Gahr Størelle.

“This is the day I’ve been waiting for. But Kongsberg’s bloodshed casts a shadow over the day, ”Støre said.

On Friday, Prime Minister Støre traveled to Kongsberg, where he visited a memorial site and met with local police. The dawn of his government began with blatant violence, but Norway has experience of similar crises and how to overcome them.

A new minister of education also took office in the new government on Thursday Tonje Brenna and the Minister of Trade and Industry Jan Christian Vestre.

They were both on the island of Utøya ten years ago.