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School shooting threat was 'a joke'

TT/The Local
TT/The Local - [email protected]
School shooting threat was 'a joke'

The threat of a massacre at a school in southern Sweden was only a joke, according to the boy who confessed to posting it on the internet.

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The night following Wednesday's school shooting in Germany, police in Lund received a tip about a threat on the internet chat site 4chan.org.

It featured a boy posing with a weapon-like object. The text, which also referred to the German school massacre, explained that the Spyken high school in Lund would never be the same.

On Thursday morning, Swedish police took the 17-year-old boy featured in the threat in for questioning.

He told police he didn’t know that the photo had been used in the context of a threat.

Later on Thursday, another boy turned himself in to authorities. He was released after being questioned.

It’s doubtful whether the second boy can be considered to have made a legitimate threat, according to public prosecutor Maja Källén.

“At the top of the page where he wrote this stood something along the lines of ‘everything on this page is a joke and anyone who believes it is an idiot’,” she said.

The number of threats of violence against schools increases following every school shooting, internet surveillance expert Anders Ahlqvist with the Swedish National Police Board (Rikspolisstyrelsen) told the TT news agency.

Since last year’s shooting in Finland, he’s heard of around 15 threats against schools in Sweden which have prompted police intervention.

“We are completely dependent on the public to be observant about this and tell us when a threat is discovered,” said Ahlqvist.

Ahlqvist added, however, that it’s important to pass along detailed information.

“There’s no point in calling the police and saying you seen some clip on YouTube. You have to be thorough enough to figure out exactly where you see it, the search terms, etc,” he said.

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