Investigation after attack in Norway: “There was a problem with radicalization”

After the fatal attack in Kongsberg, Norway, the suspect is said to have confessed to the crime. According to investigators, he had converted to Islam and had been the focus of the police for a long time because of suspected radicalization.

The day after, the small town in the south of the country is still in shock. Kongsberg is about 80 kilometers from the capital Oslo and has a population of around 22,000. “I am shocked and close to tears,” said a woman who, like everyone else, is deeply shaken. “It’s scary that something like that can happen in little Kongsberg.”

The suspect is a 37-year-old Dane who has lived in Kongsberg for years. The attacker shot at people with a bow and arrow in various places yesterday evening, including at or in a supermarket, killing five of them: four women and one man and two other people were seriously injured. You are in the intensive care unit, but your life is not in danger.

According to the police, the man confessed to the crime that night. According to his lawyer, he is cooperating with the investigators. However, the motive for the crime is still unclear. The man had received medical treatment and was known to the police, according to Commissioner Ole Bredrup Sæverud in the morning:

We are investigating whether it is a terrorist attack. But it is complicated to link all of this to a motif. From older information about the man, we can see that there was a problem with radicalization here. The person has converted to Islam.

“Cruel and brutal act”

The conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg, who handed over her office to the Social Democrat Jonas Gahr Støre on schedule after a defeat in September, expressed her condolences to the survivors of the victims that night. “The news we got from Kongsberg tonight is terrible,” she said. “There have been several victims, the situation is dramatic. I understand that many people are afraid. So I want to emphasize that the police are in control of the situation.” Her successor Støre spoke of a “cruel and brutal act”.

King Harald also commented on this today, and the court published a written declaration. It says, among other things:

I am appalled by the tragic events in Kongsberg last night. We have compassion for the loved ones and the injured in their grief and despair. Norway is a small country. If the people of Kongsberg are hit this hard now, the rest of the nation will stand by you.

Norway has been the target of attacks on several occasions

The country had been the target of attacks several times in the past. The last time in August two years ago, a 22-year-old Norwegian right-wing extremist shot his Chinese-born stepsister and then attacked a mosque near the capital Oslo. However, he was overwhelmed without injuring other people more seriously and was later sentenced to a maximum sentence of at least 21 years in prison for the terrorist attack.

As was Anders Breivik years earlier, who carried out the worst attack ever in Norway in 2011. In the explosion of a bomb he had planted in Oslo’s government district and a subsequent rampage in the summer camp of the social democratic youth organization on the nearby island of Utøya, he murdered 77 people.