Malmö (Sweden) shooter targeting immigrants: police
Police in Malmö now believe that more than a dozen unexplained shootings which have taken place in the city this year may be connected.
* Three injured in Malmö shootings (20 Oct 10)
“We have established a special unit here in Malmoe to investigate between 10 and 15 similar crimes … They are all shootings with no apparent motive,” local police spokesman Lars-Haakan Lindholm told AFP.
While the special unit has refused to reveal exactly which cases it is looking into, Lindholm said they had in common that the victims in virtually every case appeared to be of immigrant origin and “we have no explanation for why they were shot.”
“It does appear that there are racist motives,” he said, adding that “we are receiving help from profilers from the national police force. This is our number one top priority right now.”
In nearly every case, the shootings have taken place just after nightfall and have targeted people with immigrant backgrounds, Skåne County police spokesperson J-B Cederholm told reporters during a Wednesday morning press conference.
“The two most recent shootings look exactly alike: men of colour have been shot from behind near a bus stop,” said Cederholm, according to the TT news agency.
A criminal profiling unit from Sweden’s National Investigation Department (Rikskriminalen) has been brought into the investigation and is now working in parallel with the county police in Skåne.
The 28-year-old man who was shot near a bus stop in Malmö on Tuesday night has had the bullet removed.
“It landed 5 centimetres from the spine,” said Cederholm.
The man was among three victims who were shot within within the course of just a few hours Tuesday night in Malmö. Each of the victims was seriously injured.
A 19-year-old suspect was detained later on suspicions of attempted murder for the shooting of the two victims around 12.30am Wednesday morning in the city’s Lindängen neighbourhood.
The shootings involving the 19-year-old are not believed to be related to the shooting of the 28-year-old man who was waiting for a bus.
During their press conference, police focused on the possible connections between the shooting of the 28-year-old and other, similar shootings in the city in recent months.