A man wielding a bow and arrow in an attack on a Norwegian town stabbed the five victims to death, according to new details from police who are investigating “illness” as the motive.
And while authorities described the attack shortly after it stunned the town last week as an apparent “terrorist act,” officials have since pointed to his mental state as the likely cause.
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Law enforcement officers arrested a Danish man over the rare mass killing on Wednesday, in which he roamed the streets of Kongsberg in the evening shooting arrows at people. Police now say he killed five people by stabbing them, some in their homes — not with his bow and arrow.
In the country’s worst such assault in years, the 37-year-old resident injured at least three people, one of them an off-duty officer who was at a Coop Extra supermarket on the town’s west side.
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The policeman emerged from the store with an arrow lodged in his back, warning others to get away, witnesses told Norway’s public broadcaster. One of them said she saw a person carrying arrows in a basket over the shoulder.
The alleged attacker later appeared nearby without the archery equipment and stabbed people seemingly at random, an inspector in the southeast district, Per Thomas Omholt, said on Monday.
“Some were killed inside their own homes, others out in public,” he said. Officers seized “stabbing weapons linked to” the attack, he added but, he would not specify the type of armament because they were still collecting witness testimonies.
Police chief Oeyvind Aas on Oct. 13 said a man armed with a bow and arrow killed and injured several people in Kongsberg, Norway. (The Washington Post)
Police have also cast doubt on claims that the suspect was a Muslim convert, and Omholt has said that while the man had professed this before, he did not appear “serious.”
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The comments came after Norway’s security service declared last week that authorities were treating the incident as an apparent “terrorist act” — without giving details — and a regional police chief said there were concerns of “radicalization” in the past about the suspect.
In a statement on Monday, however, police said that “illness appears to be the most probable hypothesis in terms of motive for the action.”
Police have charged the man they identified as Espen Andersen Brathen, who they say appeared to act alone and has confessed. So far he faces five counts of murder but no terror charges.
He is in custody at a mental health institution and will spend two weeks in isolation, pending “a full judicial observation” into whether he was sane at the time of the crime, the police said on Friday.
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After the killing spree that lasted about half an hour, Norway’s prime minister, whose cabinet took office last week the day after, visited the town.
Residents lay flowers and lit candles for those who died: four women and a man all over 50 years old — an artist and a couple in their 70s among them. It was the worst mass killing in the Scandinavian country since 2011, when a right-wing extremist killed 77 people in a bombing and shooting.
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