HELSINKI (AP) – A powerful explosion shook a Swedish apartment building early on Tuesday in Gothenburg and injured up to 20 people, extinguished several fires and forced the evacuation of hundreds. Police say they suspect the explosion may have been caused by an explosive device.
The explosion took place just before five in the morning in the Annedal district in central Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city. Fires spread to several apartments, and the fire brigade’s crews were still working to put out the flames in the middle of the morning.
Jon Pile, operations manager at the major rescue service in Gothenburg, said that the explosion made some people jump out of the windows to escape.
Police spokesman Thomas Fuxborg said that the cause of the explosion is not yet known, but he told TV4 that investigators believe that nasty games may have been involved. They are investigating whether any tenants may have been targeted, he said.
“We suspect that someone may have placed something that has exploded,” said Fuxborg.
Sahlgrenska University Hospital’s spokesperson Ingrid Frederiksson said that 16 people were taken to Gothenburg’s main hospital. Four people – three elderly women and a man in his 50s – were treated for serious injuries, she said. Some with minor injuries were treated on the spot.
Byggnadsbo Lars Hulten told the daily newspaper Goteborg Tidning that the sound of the explosion woke him up.
“It was probably the loudest thing I heard. The whole apartment vibrated. The bed vibrated, he said.
Hulten said he saw desperate people โhanging from balconies and climbing over balconies. There was one who fell. It was very dramatic and a very fast course of fire and smoke. โ
Another witness, Lars-Gunnar Wolmesjo, told the newspaper Expressen that he also saw people on their balconies and “some climbed down, some jumped and some had to wait for the firefighters to pick them up with a ladder.”
Pile told reporters that it appeared as if the explosion took place in the courtyard of the building, where the gate was blown away.
The explosion comes in the midst of increased violence between organized criminal gangs in the Scandinavian nation.
On June 30, a policeman was shot and killed in Gothenburg. A 17-year-old suspect has since been arrested. Earlier this year, Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention said that Sweden was the only European country where fatal shootings have increased significantly since 2000, mainly due to violent gangs.
In 2019, a powerful explosion hit two adjacent apartment buildings in Linkoping in southern Sweden, 25 people were injured and more than 100 apartments were damaged. Police believe that a fight between opposing criminal gangs was behind the explosion. No arrests have been made.
Swedish media immediately focused on Tuesday on the possibility that the Gothenburg explosion could be related to warring gangs, but Prime Minister Stefan Lofven repeatedly refused to speculate on a motive.
“We do not want to speculate on what this is. It is too early to draw conclusions. We do not know what the motive is. We know nothing, says Lofven.
“We all want to know more. We want to understand what happened and what was the cause of this explosion, but it is clear that crime can not be ruled out, says Minister of the Interior Mikael Damberg at the press conference with Lofven.
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Jan M. Olsen contributed from Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Source: sn.dk