Swedish Bombing Suspect Came As Child From Iraq
STOCKHOLM -- A day after two explosions struck the heart of Sweden's capital, killing the man suspected of being a suicide bomber and wounding two other people, investigators began to focus on the possibility the suspect was a disaffected Iraqi-born Swede who had attended college in Britain. Reports in British and Swedish newspapers, citing government sources, identified the man as Taimour al-Abdaly, a 28-year-old Sunni Muslim whose family moved to Sweden from Baghdad in 1992. Sweden's prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, head of a center-right coalition, said the police were "treating this as a terrorist action," but appealed to Swedes not to jump to "the wrong conclusions" or allow preliminary reports to stir fresh tensions over Sweden's growing immigrant population, including about 450,000 Muslims. Sweden's "openness is worth giving ourselves the time to get to the bottom of this," he said. Although officials withheld the name of the bombing suspect, the director of operations for the security police, Anders Thornberg, told reporters that investigators "now have a clearer idea about him." Reports in Swedish newspapers said the man's identity had been traced through the license plate of a car used in the blasts, and Thornberg hinted he had acted alone. The first blast came from a car parked near the busy shopping street of Drottninggatan in central Stockholm shortly before 5 p.m. local time Saturday, and appeared to involve gas canisters found in the wreckage. A second blast minutes later was about 200 yards away. A man's body was discovered after the second explosion. The newspaper Aftonbladet reported on its website that the man had been carrying pipe bombs and a backpack full of nails. It was unclear why the suicide bomber, if that is what he was, had detonated his bomb in an area with relatively few people, when he could have chosen the crowded shops along Drottninggatan, a pedestrian mall hundreds of yards long. Dan Skeppe, an editor at Tidningarnas Telegrambyra, said the agency had received recordings attached to an e-mail minutes before the blasts. The statements, obtained by The New York Times, were made in Arabic, Swedish and English. In one recording, a man, speaking in fluent and scarcely accented English, addressed himself "to Sweden." The message singled out Lars Vilks, a cartoonist threatened repeatedly with death since publishing a derogatory cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in 2007, and demanded European nations withdraw their soldiers from Afghanistan. Then, with the sound of the turn of a page, he addressed his wife and children. The man confessed to them that trips he had made to the Middle East were not for business, but for "jihad." "I love you all. Please forgive me if I lied to you. It wasn't very easy to live the last four years with the secret of being mujahid," he said, using an Arabic word for holy warrior, "or as you call it terrorist." The final words of the message were directed at "all hidden mujahedeen in Europe and especially in Sweden." Now, the speaker said, is "the time to strike even if you only have a knife to strike with, and I do know that you have more than that." The Swedish newspaper Expressen quoted al-Abdaly's father as saying Timour al-Abdaly had not responded to calls since Saturday. In a recent profile he had placed on an Islamic dating website, Muslima.com, the younger al-Abdaly described himself as an Iraqi who moved with his family to Sweden in 1992. The profile said that he had moved to Britain in 2001 to study for a degree, which was described in al-Abdaly's Facebook profile as "sports therapy at the University of Bedfordshire." The Facebook profile said he graduated in 2004.