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No sign Stockholm bomber had help: Säpo

AFP/The Local
AFP/The Local - [email protected]
No sign Stockholm bomber had help: Säpo

Sweden's intelligence agency announced on Thursday that there are no indications that the man behind Sweden's first suicide bombing had any accomplices.

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The Swedish Security Service (Säkerhetspolisen, Säpo) summed up its probe on Thursday, two months after the attack.

"There is nothing for the time being indicating he had accomplices," Säpo spokeswoman Sirpa Franzén told AFP, adding that the agency was still "not ruling out the possibility."

During the 60 days since Taimour Abdulwahab, a 29-year-old sports therapist, blew up his car and then himself near a busy Stockholm shopping street on December 11th, Säpo said it had received nearly 1,000 tips from the public, conducted around 700 interrogations and examined several hundred items.

The agency had never officially identified Abdulwahab as the bomber, who was the only one to die in the twin blasts, but on Thursday, Franzén confirmed his identity.

"We have determined who he was. It is who everyone is saying it is," she said.

Abdulwahab, a Swedish citizen who lived in the British town of Luton with his wife and three children, narrowly missed wreaking carnage among Christmas shoppers when he blew himself up next to Stockholm's busiest pedestrian street a day before his 29th birthday.

He was carrying a cocktail of explosives and is believed to have mistakenly set off a small explosion that killed him before he could carry out what appears to have been a mission to kill "as many people as possible," a Swedish prosecutor said days after the attack.

An Islamist website, Shumukh al-Islam, posted a purported will by Abdulwahab which said he was fulfilling a threat by Al-Qaeda in Iraq to attack Sweden.

Shortly before the explosions, Säpo and the TT news agency received an email with audio files in which Abdulwahab is heard telling "all hidden mujahedeen in Europe, and especially in Sweden, it is now the time to fight back."

Säpo would not comment on media reports claiming a second person can be heard breathing in the background on the files, indicating Abdulwahab had help organising the attack.

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