B.Several people were injured and killed in an act of violence in Norway. The Norwegian police announced this at a press conference on Wednesday evening. The act took place around 6:30 p.m. in the center of the city of Kongsberg, which is around 80 kilometers southwest of Oslo. The police can unfortunately confirm that there have been several injuries and deaths, said the police chief Øyvind Aas.
“The man was arrested,” said Aas. “According to our information so far, he carried out the deeds alone.”
The background was initially unclear. According to the police, it was still too early to answer the question of whether it could have been a terrorist-motivated act.
At the press conference late in the evening, the police initially did not provide an exact number of victims. There were several dead and several injured, repeated the responsible police chief Aas in front of reporters in Kongsberg, where the crime took place in the early evening. The newspaper “Verdens Gang” had previously reported, citing anonymous sources, that at least four people had been killed.
Attack in several locations in the center of Kongsberg
Aas also said that the police had been reported by several people at 6.13 p.m. that an armed man was moving through the city and shooting people with a bow and arrow. He did not say whether another weapon was needed. The act took place in several places in the center of Kongsberg.
The perpetrator moved over a larger area. It is natural that one also checks whether it is a terrorist act. Aas emphasized that he could not answer many questions yet.
Norway experienced the worst terrorist attack in modern history ten years ago. On July 22, 2011, right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb hidden in a white van in the government district of Oslo, killing eight people in the process.
He then drove to the island of Utøya, about 30 kilometers away, where he pretended to be a police officer and opened fire on the participants in the annual summer camp of the youth organization of the Social Democratic Labor Party.
69 people, mostly teenagers and young adults, were killed on Utøya. Breivik named right-wing extremist and Islamophobic motives for his actions. He was sentenced to a long prison term in August 2012.
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