Terrorism in Sweden

last updated 8 January 2015

Sweden was stunned this week by the first suicide bombing on its soil, though the botched attack killed only the bomber. Police said Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, an Iraqi-born Swede, targeted a Stockholm shopping district, hoping to kill as many Christmas shoppers as possible. “He had a bomb belt on him, he had a backpack with a bomb, and he was carrying an object that has been compared to a pressure cooker,” said Tomas Lindstrand, Sweden’s chief prosecutor. “If it had all blown up at the same time, it would have been very powerful.” After he detonated a car bomb, which injured two people, Abdaly’s suicide belt exploded, apparently by accident. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt denounced the attack as “unacceptable,” but also urged Swedes to “stand up for tolerance” toward Muslim immigrants.

In an e-mail he sent before the attack, Abdaly said he was targeting Sweden mainly because it had permitted a newspaper to publish a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, said The New York Times in an editorial. If Sweden, an “open society” committed to peace, is a target of Islamic extremists, then “no country is immune.” Sweden has generated plenty of violence without the assistance of radical Islam, said Swedish journalist Per Wirtén in the London Guardian. Two politicians have been assassinated in Stockholm streets: Prime Minister Olof Palme, in 1986, and Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, in 2003. This year, a skinhead was arrested for allegedly shooting more than a dozen immigrants, killing one of them. “What distinguishes Sweden nowadays is not the absence of political violence but its presence.”

But this attack has its roots in Britain, not Sweden, said Martin Evans in the London Telegraph. Abdaly lived in Luton, England, “a hotbed of Islamic extremism,” for the past decade, and returned to Sweden only two weeks ago. Like the Nigerian-born “underwear bomber,” Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, Abdaly was radicalized while attending university here, even naming his British-born son “Osama.” It seems Britain has a new export: terrorists.