STOCKHOLM: A hijacked beer truck plowed into pedestrians at a central Stockholm department store Friday, killing four people, injuring 15 and sending screaming shoppers scattering in panic in what Sweden’s prime minister called a terrorist attack.
A nationwide manhunt was launched and one person was arrested following the latest use of a vehicle as a weapon in Europe.
Nearby buildings were locked down for hours in the heart of the capital and the main train station was evacuated.
“Sweden has been attacked,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said in a nationally televised press conference. “This indicates that it is an act of terror.”
He added: “The country is in a state of shock.”
The truck traveled for more than 500 yards (meters) along a promenade known as the Drottninggatan and smashed into a crowd outside the Ahlens department store about 3 p.m. It came to rest in the entrance to the building. TV footage showed smoke coming out of the store after the crash.
“People were screaming and running in all directions,” said Brandon Sekitto, who was in his car nearby.
He added that the truck “drove straight into the Ahlens entrance.”
“I saw the driver, a man in black who was light around the face area,” Brandon told Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. “I heard how some women were screaming, ‘Run, run!’“
Although there was confusion throughout the day on the number of victims, the Stockholm City Council said in the evening that four had been killed and 15 were wounded, nine seriously.
Authorities evacuated the nearby Central Station, a hub for regional trains and the subway system. All trains to and from the main station were halted and several large shopping malls in Stockholm were shut down. Sweden’s national theater, Dramaten, canceled three performances Friday evening.
Police arrested a man in Marsta, a northern Stockholm suburb close to the international airport.
“We have arrested one in whom we are particularly interested,” Jan Evensson of the Stockholm police told a news conference.
He said the person looked like the man depicted wearing a greenish hood in a surveillance camera photo the police released earlier.
“We continue to investigate at full force,” Evensson said, urging people not to go to central Stockholm.
Stefan Hector of Sweden’s national police said the working hypothesis was that “this is an act of terror.”
The Swedish brewery Spendrups said one of its trucks had been hijacked a few blocks from the scene earlier in the day.
“It is one of our delivery trucks. In connection with a delivery to a restaurant called Caliente, someone jumped into the truck and drove it away while the driver was unloading his delivery,” Spendrups spokesman Marten Luth told the Swedish news agency TT.
The beer company’s truck driver was not injured, he said.
The truck crash appeared to be the latest attack in Europe using a vehicle.
In an attack last month claimed by the Daesh group, a man drove into a crowd on London’s Westminster Bridge, killing three people and injuring many others before stabbing a policeman to death. He was shot and killed by police. A fourth person, a woman thrown into the Thames by the force of the car attack, died Thursday.
The IS group also claimed responsibility for a truck attack that killed 86 people in Nice, France, in July 2016 during a Bastille Day festival, as well as another truck attack that killed 12 people at a Christmas market in Berlin.
Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf cut short a visit to Brazil on Friday to return home and sent the royal family’s condolences to the families of the victims.
Condolences poured into Sweden. In neighboring Finland, President Sauli Niinisto said he was shocked by the “maniac act of terror,” adding “every terror attack is to be equally condemned. But it touches us deeply when such an attack takes place in our Nordic neighborhood.”
Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen called the attack a cowardly attempt “to subdue us and the peaceful way we live in Scandinavia.”
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said the Eiffel Tower’s lights will be turned off from midnight Friday in homage. She expressed her “strong emotion” over “this new terrorist attack of immense cowardice.”
EU Council President Donald Tusk said in a tweet that “my heart is in Stockholm this afternoon. My thoughts are with the victims and their families and friends of today’s terrible attack.”
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said “one of Europe’s most vibrant and colorful cities appears to have been struck by those wishing it — and our very way of life — harm.”
Juncker also said “an attack on any of our (EU) member states is an attack on us all” and that Sweden can count on EU help.
In February, US President Donald Trump suggested that Sweden could be the next European country to suffer the kind of extremist attacks that have devastated France, Belgium and Germany. Two days after his remarks, a riot broke out in predominantly immigrant suburb of Stockholm where police opened fire on rioters, a surprise to many Swedes who aren’t used to officers using guns.
Friday’s crash was near the site of a December 2010 attack in Stockholm in which Taimour Abdulwahab, a Swedish citizen who lived in Britain, detonated a suicide bomb, killing himself and injuring two others.
Abdulwahab had rigged a car with explosives in the hope the blast would drive people to Drottninggatan — the street hit Friday — where he would set off devices strapped to his chest and back. The car bomb never went off, and Abdulwahab died when one of his devices exploded among panicked Christmas shoppers.
Four killed in Stockholm truck attack described as terrorism
Four killed in Stockholm truck attack described as terrorism
British PM Starmer to set out detailed policy targets in week ahead
- Starmer said he would set out a “plan for change” as the next phase of delivering goals including the fastest sustained growth in the Group of Seven advanced economies, a halving of serious violent crime, lower energy bills and less ill health
LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will set more detailed targets in the coming week to achieve the government’s five main goals on areas including growth, health care, crime and green energy, as his party approaches five months in power.
Labour won a sweeping majority in Britain’s lower house of parliament in July, taking power for the first time in 14 years, but has fallen just behind the opposition Conservative Party in some recent opinion polls.
Starmer said he would set out a “plan for change” as the next phase of delivering goals including the fastest sustained growth in the Group of Seven advanced economies, a halving of serious violent crime, lower energy bills and less ill health.
“Mission-led government does not mean picking milestones because they are easy or will happen anyway. It means relentlessly driving real improvements in the lives of working people,” Starmer said in a statement released by his office.
Government ministers and officials would be told to focus on these goals rather than individual ministries’ traditional priorities, Starmer’s office added.
Labour has not had an easy start in office. Ministers say the previous government concealed the extent of problems in areas such as prisons and the immigration system, contributing to what finance minister Rachel Reeves said was a 22 billion pound ($28 billion) black hole in public finances.
Conservatives dispute this and say much of the cost overrun reflected Labour decisions to increase pay for public-sector workers and standard in-year spending variations.
Reeves announced 40 billion pounds of tax rises in her first budget last month — up from around 8 billion pounds in Labour’s pre-election plan — on top of higher borrowing to halt a fall in public investment planned by the previous government.
Businesses have complained that they will bear the brunt of the tax rises and will probably cut investment or jobs and need to raise prices as a result.
Trump wants pardoned real estate developer Charles Kushner to become US ambassador to France
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida: President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday he intends to nominate real estate developer Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, to serve as ambassador to France.
Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post, calling Charles Kushner “a tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker.”
Kushner is the founder of Kushner Companies, a real estate firm. Jared Kushner is a former White House senior adviser to Trump who is married to Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka.
The elder Kushner was pardoned by Trump in December 2020 after pleading guilty years earlier to tax evasion and making illegal campaign donations.
Prosecutors alleged that after Charles Kushner discovered his brother-in-law was cooperating with federal authorities in an investigation, he hatched a scheme for revenge and intimidation.
Kushner hired a prostitute to lure his brother-in-law, then arranged to have the encounter in a New Jersey motel room recorded with a hidden camera and the recording sent to his own sister, the man’s wife, prosecutors said.
Kushner eventually pleaded guilty to 18 counts including tax evasion and witness tampering. He was sentenced in 2005 to two years in prison — the most he could receive under a plea deal, but less than what Chris Christie, the US attorney for New Jersey at the time and later governor and Republican presidential candidate, had sought.
Christie has blamed Jared Kushner for his firing from Trump’s transition team in 2016, and has called Charles Kushner’s offenses “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was US attorney.”
Trump and the elder Kushner knew each other from real estate circles and their children were married in 2009.
France returns ancient artifacts to Ethiopia
- The artifacts currently stored at the French Embassy in Addis Ababa will be delivered to the Ethiopian Heritage Directorate on Tuesday
ADDIS ABABA: France on Saturday began the return of some 3,500 archeolo-gical artifacts to Ethiopia, which Paris held since the 1980s for study.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot handed over two prehistoric stone axes, bifaces, and a stone cutter to Ethiopia’s Tourism Minister Selamawit Kassa during a visit to the National Museum in Addis Ababa.
The tools are “samples of nearly 3,500 artifacts from the excavations carried out on the Melka Kunture site,” a cluster of prehistoric sites south of the capital excavated under the direction of a late French researcher, Barrot said.
France and Ethiopia hold a longstanding bilateral agreement to cooperate in archeology and paleontology.
The artifacts stored at the French Embassy in Addis Ababa will be delivered to the Ethiopian Heritage Directorate on Tuesday.
“This is a handover, not a restitution, in that these objects have never been part of French public collections,” said Laurent Serrano, culture adviser at the French Embassy.
“These artifacts, which date back between 1 and 2 million years, were found during excavations carried out over several decades at a site near the Ethiopian capital,” he added.
Concern grows over rise in fatal migrant shipwrecks in Greece
- UNHCR representative: ‘Counting lives lost at sea cannot become a norm’
ATHENS: The UN refugee agency has voiced concern at a rise in deaths of migrants trying to reach Greece by sea in small boats from Turkiye, following two fatal shipwrecks this week.
The UNHCR said in a statement Friday that 17 people have died in such accidents this month, while the total so far this year is at least 45 deaths.
Some 56,000 people have illegally entered Greece since Jan. 1, mostly by sea. That’s a five-year high, and the number has already exceeded government estimates of some 50,000 arrivals by the year’s end in October.
The UNHCR representative in Greece, Maria Clara Martin, said the migrant deaths “highlight the urgent need for long-term responses and safer and credible alternatives” for people fleeing conflict, persecution, violence, or human rights violations.
“Counting lives lost at sea cannot become a norm — we should not get used to it,” she said.
The UN agency said that this week’s two fatal accidents off the eastern Aegean Sea island of Samos, which is close to the Turkish coast, saw a mother lose three of her children, while another survivor lost his wife and daughter.
Greek authorities have attributed this year’s rise in migrant arrivals to conflicts in the Middle East.
While there’s been a surge in people attempting the long and dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossing from Libya to the southern Greek island of Crete, most migrants pay smuggling gangs to ferry them from Turkiye to the eastern Aegean islands.
On Friday, the Greek coast guard said it arrested a 17-year-old Turkish youth on suspicion of having landed 16 migrants — including three children — on the eastern island of Chios.
Tunisia and Libya have become vital departure points for migrants, often from other African countries, who risk perilous Mediterranean Sea journeys in the hopes of reaching better lives in Europe.
Each year, tens of thousands of people attempt to make the crossing. Italy, whose Lampedusa island is only 150 km from Tunisia, is often their first port of call.
In the latest incident reported on Friday, two unidentified bodies were recovered off Tunisia’s eastern coast after a migrant boat capsized, with one person still missing and 28 rescued.
The boat had set sail from Teboulba, a coastal town some 180 km south of Tunis.
In late October, the bodies of 15 people believed to be migrants were recovered by authorities in Monastir, eastern Tunisia.
And in late September, 36 would-be migrants — mainly Tunisians — were rescued off Bizerte in northern Tunisia.
Since Jan. 1, at least 103 makeshift boats have capsized, and 341 bodies have been recovered off Tunisia’s coast, according to the Interior Ministry.
Kenyan, Ugandan presidents to mediate Ethiopia-Somalia dispute
- Somaliland has struggled to gain international recognition despite governing itself and enjoying comparative peace and stability since declaring independence in 1991
NAIROBI: Kenya’s President William Ruto said on Saturday he and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni would help mediate a dispute between Ethiopia and Somalia, threatening the region’s stability.
Landlocked Ethiopia, which has thousands of troops in Somalia to fight Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents, has fallen out with the Mogadishu government over its plans to build a port in the breakaway region of Somaliland in exchange for possible recognition of its sovereignty.
Somaliland has struggled to gain international recognition despite governing itself and enjoying comparative peace and stability since declaring independence in 1991.
The spat has drawn Somalia closer to Egypt, which has quarreled with Ethiopia for years over Addis Ababa’s construction of a vast hydro dam on the Nile River, and Eritrea, another of Ethiopia’s foes.
Somaliland has struggled to gain international recognition despite governing itself and enjoying comparative peace and stability since declaring independence in 1991.
“Because the security of Somalia ... contributes significantly to the stability of our region, and the environment for investors, business people, and entrepreneurs to thrive,” he told a news conference.
Several attempts to resolve the feud in Ankara, Turkiye, failed to make a breakthrough.
Ethiopia’s government and foreign affairs spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Somalia’s foreign minister could not immediately be reached by Reuters.
The government of Somalia’s semi-autonomous Jubbaland state said earlier it was suspending relations and cooperation with the federal government in Mogadishu following a dispute over regional elections.
Jubbaland, which borders Kenya and Ethiopia and is one of Somalia’s five semi-autonomous states, reelected regional president Ahmed Mohammed Islam Madobe for a third term in elections on Monday.
However, the national government based in Mogadishu, led by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, opposed the election, saying it was held without federal involvement.
