Sweden’s government has announced plans to strengthen its gun laws, including by restricting access to semi-automatic weapons, after the country’s worst mass shooting.
On Tuesday, a gunman killed 10 people at an education centre in Örebro, west of Stockholm. Police have not said what type of weapon he used but they have said he had a licence to own four weapons – three of which were found beside him.
“The horrific act of violence in Örebro raises several key questions about gun legislation,” the centre-right coalition government, which relies on the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats, said. As well as tightening legislation, it said it wanted to improve the way that people considered “medically unsuitable” for weapons possession were reported.
“We have to ensure that only the right people have guns in Sweden,” Ulf Kristersson, Sweden’s prime minister, said during a visit to Latvia.
Police have not yet named the victims or the perpetrator, who also died, but they have said they include “multiple nationalities, different genders and different ages”. The Guardian understands that the victims include a Syrian man, an Eritrean woman and an Iranian woman. Police are investigating whether the shooting was racially motivated.
Swedish hunters, of whom there are hundreds of thousands, are able to apply for licences for semi-automatic weapons. In August 2023, the environmental protection agency lifted a ban on military-style models, meaning guns such as the AR-15 were permitted for hunting.
The government said on Friday it wanted to reimpose restrictions that existed before 2023 and develop a strategy to seize military-style weapons. “The AR-15 is an example of a weapon that is compatible with large magazines and can cause a lot of damage in a short time,” it said.
The government said a recent report found that several of the requirements that should be taken into account when assessing a person’s suitability for a weapons permit were not clearly stated in weapons regulations, and that they should be set out in law. These include age, knowledge, skills, some medical factors and how law-abiding a person is.
It also plans to add provisions on doctors’ reporting obligations in relation to weapons and the police’s ability to revoke permits.
The main opposition party, the Social Democrats, said it welcomed the government’s announcement, but called for all weapons licences to be reviewed. It also said there should be a review of how registers between authorities were cross-checked.
The Syrian embassy in Stockholm has said its citizens were among the dead.
The suspect, who apparently killed himself, has been named in media reports as Rickard Andersson, 35, a former student of the school who lived locally. He is understood to have attended maths classes at the school a few years ago and had been unemployed for a decade.
Among the victims was Salim Iskef, 28, who phoned his fiancee, Kareen Elia, 24, from the school and told her he had been shot. “He called me and said: ‘I’ve been shot, they shot us.’ He said he loves me and that’s the last thing I heard,” she said in an interview.
Members of their church said there was standing room only at a memorial service for Iskef on Thursday night.
Fr Jacob Kasselia, a priest at St Maria Örebro, the Syrian Orthodox church attended by Iskef, said the community was reeling. “We have our doors open for everybody. You can see that everybody is affected. A dark cloud has come over us all. But despite that we say that we must look for the light,” he told the Guardian.
Kasselia said he knew of two others who were killed. One of them, he said, was a woman from Eritrea, who looked after her four children alone, and the other was a woman aged between 45 and 50 from Iran.
The number of non-Swedish victims would affect Örebro and the whole country, said Kasselia, who went to the remembrance service attended by the prime minister and the king and queen on Wednesday. “It is dark over us all.”
The Bosnian Islamic Community in Örebro said the organisation had been advised to increase security since the shootings and had hired security guards to watch the mosque.
