The worst mass shooting in the history of Sweden leaves an immigrant community on the edge

In the midst of a large church with a high ceiling in Orebro, Sweden, Jacob Kasselia, a Syrian Orthodox priest, looked up at the stained glass windows above him and then back to his hands. He adjusted the gold cross hanging from his neck.

“Police say this man was acting alone,” the priest said. “But that hatred, comes from somewhere.”

A member of the Congregation Congregation, 29-year-old Salim Iskef, was among those who were killed in Orebro on Tuesday in the first school shooting in Sweden and the worst mass shootings in the history of the country. The temple killed 10 students at the adult learning center and then himself.

Among the dead are Syrians and Bosans, according to the inhabitants and embassies of these countries, but the police in Orebbro have not publicly given any details about the victims.

Kasselia described Iskefa as a kind and thoughtful, eager to help other members of the community. He came to Sweden with his mother and sister, the priest said – refugees from Aleppo, where his father was killed in the war. Iskef studied Swedish at Risberg School, the target of attacks on Tuesday.

“He was simply a good man,” the priest said. “He didn’t ask for problems. He only showed goodwill. He was a member of our community.”

The night after the attack, Kasselia was sitting with Iskef’s family to comfort them.

Iskef was engaged and should be married this summer. His fiancé Kareen Elia, 24, was “very badly affected,” said the priest, and “he went through a very difficult, very dark experience.”

In a memorial service in Orebbro on Thursday night, Elia fell apart in screams and tears and had to get out of the church.

In the days of shooting, there was a striking lack of information from the authorities. On Thursday night, police have not yet confirmed the identity of the attacker – which the Swedish media reported to the 35 -year -old Rickard Andersson – nor any details about his motive or victims.

In a statement published early Tuesday, less than 24 hours after the attack, police said the scorer seemed to be motivated by any ideology. On Thursday, Anna Bergkvist, who led a police investigation, appeared, she returned a statement.

“Why they said that, I can’t comment,” she told the BBC. “We look at different motives and we will declare them when we have it.”

Swedish police are usually careful about the appointment of suspects during the investigation, but the lack of official information has contributed to the feeling of fear and uncertainty among the immigrant communities Orebro in the last few days.

“We get all our information from the media and I don’t know why,” said Nour Afraram, 36, who was at Risberg’s school when the attack began.

“We need more information,” she said. “We don’t know why he did this, why did he target this school? Was he sick or is it something else?”

Afram waited for her to go to class when she heard that they shouted that there was a scorer – something so amazing for her at first thought it was difficulty.

“We started running and then I heard shots,” she said. “One initially, then like that, maybe ten shots. I was so scared that I felt like my heart had stopped in my chest.”

Afram, who moved from Syria to Orebro as a child, said he was afraid to send his three children to school in Sweden for the first time.

Zaki Aydin, a 50-year-old Syrian teacher in Orebro, said he was first afraid of his young students, who are mostly from the Middle East. “We are foreigners, now we have to be careful,” he said.

Aydin was the open door of his classroom and church building. “We are closing them now,” he said. “And yesterday I asked someone to stand outside to prevent anyone we didn’t know to come in.”

One of the students at school, 18-year-old Gabriel, said “nightmare was realized” for Orebbro.

“The problem is we have no motive, just guessing,” he said. “Many people of my age have been scared to go to school, we feel like Sweden has become like America. The things you see on television have happened here.”

In the absence of official news of the motive, everything that the inhabitants here in Orebro know that the killer seems to be a white Swedish man and that he aimed a school with a large immigrant base of students.

Thomas Poletti Lundstr, an academic researcher of racism at Uppsala University, who lives just a few minutes from the scene and heard that police helicopters were flying across his house on Tuesday, said Orebbro faced “a deep terrible time.”

“You can really feel it everywhere, it affects everything,” Lunds said. “We do not yet know the motives of the Sagittarius, but we live in a very racist time and this is a school for many immigrants.”

Shots like the one in Risberg were “the outcome of how our society looks at a moment, as our politicians talk and how we talk about each other,” he said. “This happens when politicians say the way they are saying right now.”

At the cordonated entrance to Risberg School early Thursday morning, people stopped to leave flowers, light candles or simply stood and take on stage. From the street you can clearly see the front door through which the killer was shot from the classroom to the classroom with a rifle.

Among those who came alone and stood for some time with a collection of candles and flowers was the mayor of the city, John Johansson, who visited the place the day before, along with the Prime Minister and the King and the Queen, but stopped there again on the way to work on Thursday on Thursday in order to pay tribute.

“I hope the police will find conclusions soon,” Johansson said. “They need the city answers, our society need answers, and the victims’ families need to know why it happened.”

But it’s not time to “guess or rush forward,” he said. “We do not want to contribute to any false rumors, so we hope the police will find answers as soon as possible.”

Tony Estroem, a salesman from Eskilstune, about 80 km from Orebro, also stopped the school on Thursday morning. “This kind of shooting, at school, you read about it elsewhere, but not in Sweden,” he said.

“It looks like a Swedish guy, and maybe it’s better than it was a immigrant responsible,” he added. “Of course this is an awesome event in any case, but we don’t want to add more fuel to the fire.”

Police have provided some limited information about their investigation. They said that about 130 officers answered the shooting in total and was greeted with “inferrous” at school. They said they believed the striker was acting alone.

Family members, former school friends and neighbors, told Sweden media that he has become a hermit in recent years and may have suffered from psychological problems.

There were complaints about handling the case. Bosnian Ambassador Bojan Sosic, who also visited the shooting site, learned from the inhabitants that he was Bosnian among the dead.

“At the very least, I consider the police that the police decide to deny information related to foreign citizens from the appropriate embassies,” he said.

Others, including members of the Syrian community, said they believed the police were working properly and only hoped they would know more soon. Kasselia, a Syrian Orthodox priestess, said that the wider community “does not know what the police mean, but we believe they have their own plan.”

Hundreds of people came to the church of Kasselia from Syrian, Turkish, Iraqi and other migrant communities on Thursday night. The picture of Salim Iskef, one of the victims of the shooting, was sitting on Easel. Children from the Congregation sang the anthem. The Iskef family, sitting in a bench near the front, swallowed sadness.

It is difficult to understand why such types of attack happen even when the motive is known. Without him, she is even more confusing. A few hours before the memorial started, Kasselia sat in a bench in her empty church, trying to think of it.

“People die, of course. They’re getting sick, they have an accident,” he said. “But this, how can we understand that? To be shot at school. We couldn’t dream of it. We can’t even describe it. Why?”

There was a consolation by hearing from the police that the attacker was acting alone, Kasselia said. He left less anxiety for another attack.

“But this man had something in his heart, some kind of hatred he had gathered from somewhere,” the priest said. “We can’t say that there are no others.”

Additional reporting Phelan Chatterjee. Photos by Joel Gunter.