A 31-year-old man from Kosovo has been arrested for the attempted murder of a police officer. The suspect, who was due to be deported from Sweden, slashed at the policewoman's throat with a sharp piece of glass.
The incident occurred on Tuesday afternoon at the Migration Board’s detention centre in Gävle.
“Her injuries are not life-threatening,” said police spokesman Hesam Akbari.
Two police officers had been sent to the detention centre to accompany the suspect to a waiting vehicle.
Moments prior to the attack, the man is reported to have threatened one of the police officers.
The man behind the knife attack at Sweden's Almedalen political festival has been active in the militant neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement, Swedish media have reported.
He has taken part in several neo-Nazi demonstrations over the past few years and has also expressed support for the extreme right Alternative for Sweden party on social media, the Expressen newspaper reported.
The Moderate MP Hanif Bali said on Twitter after the news came out that the stabbing was “a terror attack”. “This is nothing other than a terror attack”.
Terrordåd. Det är inget annat än ett terrordåd.
— Hanif Bali (@hanifbali) July 6, 2022
The man stabbed a woman in the upper body at the Donners plats square only a minute’s walk from the stage where all eight of Sweden’s parliamentary party leaders are making speeches this week at the Almedalen political festival. The women is being treated for severe injuries at the Visby Lasarett hospital.
The 30-something attacker fled the scene but was stopped and arrested by Lars Reuterberg, a 69-year-old pensioner.
Reuterberg told the TT newswire that he had heard someone shout “stop him!” and then seen a man jump over a fence from the corner restaurant.
“I thought he’d nicked a bag or something, and my spontaneous reaction was ‘I should take him down’. He wasn’t such a big guy, certainly no bodybuilder, so I tried to look a little uninterested, but when he came near me he ended up on the end of mighty great shove.”
The man flew into a door and then just lay here. “It was only then I saw that he had a knife, which I hadn’t known earlier, because then I might have acted differently,” he said.
“I’m livid now,” he went on. “This is the world’s most unique political week, a people’s festival where you can meet politicians and celebrities and everyone says ‘hi’, where there are journalists and everything. And this nutter goes and wrecks it all.”
“I’m quite proud of myself,” he admitted. “I was never afraid. I’m afraid now for the woman who got stabbed.”
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