Police have given out some limited information about their investigation. They said that about 130 officers responded to the shooting in total, and that they were met by an “inferno” in the school. They said that they believe the gunman acted alone.
Family members, former school friends and neighbours have told Swedish media he had become a recluse in recent years and may have suffered with psychological issues.
There have been complaints about the handling of the case. The Bosnian ambassador Bojan Sosic, who also visited the site of the shooting, learned from residents that a Bosnian was among the dead.
“I find it odd, to say the least, that the police chooses to withhold information that pertains to foreign citizens from respective embassies,” he said.
Others, including members of the Syrian community, said they trusted the police were doing the right thing and only hoped to learn more soon. Kasselia, the Syrian Orthodox priest, said that the wider community “does not know what the police are thinking, but we trust that they have their own plan”.
Hundreds of people came to Kasselia’s church on Thursday night from the Syrian, Turkish, Iraqi and other migrant communities. A picture of Salim Iskef, one of the shooting’s victims, sat on an easel. Children from the congregation sung hymns. Iskef’s family, sitting in a pew near the front, were consumed by grief.
It is difficult to understand why these sorts of attacks happen even when the motive is known. Without it, it is even more confounding. A few hours before the memorial service began, Kasselia had been sitting in a pew in his empty church, trying to make sense of it.
“People die, of course. They become sick, they have some accident,” he said. “But this, how can we understand this? To be shot dead in a school. We could not dream of this. We cannot even describe it. Why?”
There was some comfort in hearing from the police that the gunman acted alone, Kasselia said. It left less anxiety of another attack.
“But this man had something in his heart, some kind of hate, that he gathered from somewhere,” the priest said. “We cannot say there are not others.”
Additional reporting by Phelan Chatterjee. Photographs by Joel Gunter.
