United States | Suomen Sisu came to the fore in the international media – The organization’s logo allegedly resembles the pattern seen in the videos of the Illinois shooting suspect

Stateside In Highland Park, Illinois, the Independence Day celebrations came to a dramatic end on Monday, when a man standing on the roof of a building started randomly shooting at the parade audience.

At least six people died and more than 30 were injured in the mass shooting.

The suspect managed to be on the loose for several hours after the shooting, but the police caught him in the early evening local time after a short chase. The suspect is a 22-year-old man.

Read more: At least six people have died in a shooting at an Independence Day parade in Illinois – Police have arrested a suspect

Soon after the man’s arrest, the US media began to publish articles that reviewed the background of the suspected perpetrator and social media accounts.

The stories brought up how a man who called himself a rap artist has published music videos whose content refers to gun violence.

One of the videos is an animation in which a male person who looks like the suspect attacks people with a rifle, CNN tells. The suspect is believed to have fired into the crowd with a rifle. According to CNN, the videos were published last year.

Finnish way as a special topic of attention in the news has risen to information about the logo appearing repeatedly in the videos posted by the man.

For example, US news sites The Daily Beast and Newsweek and a British tabloid magazine Daily Mirror have pointed out that the man’s videos repeatedly show a pattern that is allegedly reminiscent of the logo of the nationalist Suomen Sisu organization.

In the stories, it is pointed out right after that the suspect does not seem to have any connection to the organization and the author has not otherwise mentioned it in his texts.

On the same subject has tweeted also, among other things, a filmmaker Tariq Nasheedwho has 300,000 followers.

HS has seen clips from videos in which a pattern similar to Suomen Sisu’s logo is partially repeated. In one video the logo is on a man’s helmet, in the other it is wrought on the man. In the animated video, the logo is on the chest of a figure holding a rifle.

However, the pattern used by the man in his videos is not exactly the same as Suomen Sisu’s logo.

Suomen Sisu says on its website that the organization’s emblem is “a coat of arms arranged in an octagon”. The logo of the organization has smooth sides, while the design shown in the videos has all sharp corners and no smooth sides at all. The similarity of the patterns can probably be just a coincidence.

It has also been suggested on social media that the pattern could refer to the so-called “4444 symbol”, which consists of four connected numbers four. For example, there are t-shirts with patterns for sale online.

In several foreign media stories still write about Suomen Sisu due to the similarity of the pattern. In the stories, Suomen Sisu is characterized as an “extreme right-wing Finnish organization”.

“The organization has been called ‘Nazi-style’ in the Finnish press, a characterization that the anti-immigration organization has denied and challenged in court,” Mirror writes.

The Mirror refers to an article published in Länsiväylä magazine in 2008, in which the organization was called “Nazi-spirited”. A complaint was made to the Council of Public Speaking and the Ministry of the Interior.

The interior of Finland defines itself as an organization that “strives to protect Finnish culture, traditions and Finnish nature and to promote the well-being of the Finnish people and the status of the Finnish language”.

In HS stories, it has recently been characterized as nationalistic, among other things to the radical right, fanatically nationalistic and to the extreme right.

The organization has received a lot of media attention because its members include basic Finnish MPs, such as the organization’s former long-term chairman Olli Immonen and vice-chairman of Basic Finns Mauri Peltokangas. Also the former chairman of Basic Finns Jussi Halla-aho is a former member of Suomen Sisu.