The highest mass shooting in the history of Sweden leaves the immigrant community on the edge

In the middle of a grand church with a high ceiling in Orebro, Sweden, Jacob Casselia, a Syrian Orthodox priest, looked at the stained glass windows, and then returned down into his hands. He adjusts the Golden Cross, hanging from his neck.

“Police claim that this man acted alone,” the priest said. “But this hatred, it comes from somewhere.”

A member of the Cassel Congregation, 29-year-old Salim Isief, was among the Orebro killed on Tuesday at the first school shooting of Sweden and the worst mass shooting in the country’s history. The shooter killed 10 students at an adult training center, and then he himself.

The dead are the Syrians and the Bosnians, according to the residents and embassies of these countries, but the Orebro police did not give details of the victims public.

Casselia described Isef as a kind and thoughtful, wishing to help other members of the Community. He came to Sweden with his mother and sister, said the priest, Aleppo refugees, where his father was killed in the war. Isef studied Swedish at the Risberg School, the goal of the attack on Tuesday.

“He was just a good man,” the priest said. “He was not looking for problems. He showed only goodwill. He was a member of our community.”

On the night after the attack, the cassel was sitting with Isef’s family to comfort them.

Isef was engaged and had to marry this summer. His fiancé Carrine Eliya, 24 -year -old, was “very badly affected,” the priest said, and “went through a very difficult, very dark experience.”

At a long service in Orebro on Thursday night, Eliya fell into screams and tears and had to be removed from the church.

In the days after the shooting, there is a striking lack of information from the authorities. On Thursday night, police have not yet confirmed the identity of the gunman – widely reported by the Swedish media about the 35 -year -old local Ricarda Anderson – not details of his motive or victims.

In a statement early on Tuesday, less than 24 hours after the attack, police said the shooter did not seem to be motivated by any ideology. On Thursday, Anna Bergquist, who was leading the police investigation, seems to be back to the statement.

“Why they said this, I can’t comment,” she told the BBC. “We look at different motives and we will declare it when we have it.”

Swedish police are usually cautious of the name of suspects during an investigation, but the lack of official information has contributed to a sense of fear and uncertainty among Orebro immigrant communities over the last few days.

“We get all our information from the media and I don’t know why,” said the 36 -year -old Nur Afram, who was at the Risberg school when the attack began.

“We need more information,” she said. “We don’t know why he did it. Why was he aimed at this school? Was he sick or is that something else?”

Afram was waiting for him to go into an hour when he heard people scream that there was a shooter – something so amazing to her that she thought at first it was a joke.

“We started running and then I heard the shots,” she said. “One at first, then tak tak tak – maybe ten shots. I was so scared that I felt my heart stopped in my chest.”

Afram, who immigrated from Syria to Orebro as a child, said he was afraid for the first time to send her three children to school in Sweden.

Zaki Aidin, a 50-year-old Syrian language teacher in Orebro, said he was afraid for the first time for his young students, who are mostly from the Middle East. “We are foreigners, now we have to be careful,” he said.

Aidin was open to the doors of his classroom and the church building when teaching. “We are closing them now,” he said. “And yesterday I asked someone to stand outside to prevent anyone we no longer knew to come in.”

One of the students at the school, 18-year-old Gabriel, said the nightmare is coming true for Orebro.

“The problem is that we have no motive, only speculation,” he said. “Many people my age are afraid to go to school. We feel like Sweden has become like America. The things you see on television have happened here.”

In the absence of official news about the motive, all that the residents here in Orebro know is that the killer seems to have been a courting white Swedish man and that he is aimed at a school with a large student immigrant base.

Tomash Flight Lundstrom, an academic racism researcher at Uppsala University, who happens to live just a few minutes from the scene of the attack and hear police helicopters fly over his home on Tuesday, said Orebro was facing “deep terrible weather”.

“You can really feel it everywhere, it affects everyone,” Lundstrom said. “We still do not know the Sagittarius’ motives, but we live in a very racist time and this is a school for many immigrants.”

Shooting like the one in Risberg was “the result of what our society looks like at the moment, how our politicians are talking and how we talk about each other,” he said. “This happens when politicians talk the way they talk right now.”

At the fenced entrance to the Risberg school early on Thursday morning, people stopped leaving flowers, light candles, or just standing and going on stage. From the street you can clearly see the front door through which the killer is filmed, who appears to pass from the classroom in the classroom with a rifle.

Among those who came on their own and stood for a while from the collection of candles and flowers, was the mayor of the city John Johansson, who had made an official visit to the place the previous day with the Prime Minister and the King, but stopped there again to work in the way to work in the road Thursday to give respect.

“I hope the police will find conclusions soon,” Johansson said. “The city needs answers, our society needs answers, and the victims’ families need to know why this happened.”

But it was not time to “speculate or to rush forward,” he said. “We do not want to contribute to fake rumors, so we hope the police find answers as early as possible.”

Tony Easthem, a seller from Eskilstuna, about 80 km from Orebro, also stopped from school on Thursday morning. “This type of shooting, at school, read about it elsewhere, but not in Sweden,” he said.

“He seems to be a Swedish man and maybe it’s better than if he was a responsible immigrant,” he added. “Of course it’s a terrible event, but we don’t want to add more fuel to the fire.”

Police have provided some limited information on their investigation. They said that about 130 officers responded to the shooting in general and that they had been greeted by Inferture at the school. They said they believed that the shooter had acted alone.

Family members, former school friends and neighbors have told the Swedish media that he has become a prisoner in recent years and may have suffered from psychological problems.

There are complaints about the processing of the case. Bosnian Ambassador Bojan Sosic, who also visited the scene of the shooting, taught the residents that Bosnian was among the dead.

“The lowest is strange to me that the police are choosing to refuse information that applies to foreign citizens from the respective embassies,” he said.

Others, including members of the Syrian community, have said they trust the police to do the right thing and hope only to learn more soon. Casselia, the Syrian Orthodox priest, said the broader community “does not know what the police are thinking, but we trust that they have their own plan.”

Hundreds of people came to the Cassel Church on Thursday nights from Syrian, Turkish, Iraqi and other migrant communities. A photo of Salim Isief, one of the victims of the shooting, was sitting in requests. Congregation children sang hymns. Isef’s family sitting in Lava near the front were consumed with grief.

It is difficult to understand why these types of attacks happen even when the motive is known. Without it, it’s even more confusing. A few hours before the deadline began, the cassel was sitting in Lava in his empty church, trying to make sense of it.

“People die, of course. They get sick, have some accident,” he said. “But how can we understand this? Let’s be shot at school. We couldn’t dream of it. We can’t even describe it. Why?”

Police had some consolation that the gunman was acting alone, Cassellia said. Leave less anxiety than another attack.

“But this man had something in his heart, some hatred that he gathered from somewhere,” the priest said. “We can’t say there are no others.”

Additional reporting from Phelan Chatterjee. Photos by Joel Gunter.