The worst mass shooting in the history of Sweden leaves the immigrant community to the limit

In the midst of a large high roof church in Over, Sweden, Jacob Kasselia, a Syrian Orthodox priest, looked towards the stained glass on him, and then returned to his hands. He adjusted the Golden Cross hanging from his neck.

“The police say that this man acted alone,” said the priest. “But this hatred comes from somewhere.”

A member of the Congregation of Kasselia, Salim Iskef, 29, was among those killed in Over on Tuesday in the shooting at the first Sweden school and the worst mass shooting in the history of the country. The armed man killed 10 students in an adult learning center and then himself.

Among the dead are Syrians and Bosnians, according to residents and embassies of those countries, but the police in Orebro have not given any details of the victims publicly.

Kasselia described Iskef as kind and reflexive, interested in helping other community members. He arrived in Sweden with his mother and sister, said the priest: Aleppo refugees, where his father was killed in the war. Iskef was studying Swedish at Risbergska School, the goal of Tuesday’s attack.

“It was simply a good man,” said the priest. “He didn’t look for problems. He showed only good will. He was a member of our community.”

The night after the attack, Kasselia sat with Iskef’s family to comfort them.

Iskef was committed and married this summer. His fiancé Kareen Elia, 24, was “very affected,” said the priest, and was “going through a very difficult and very dark experience.”

In a commemorative service in Orebro on Thursday night, Elia broke into shouts and tears and had to be carried out from the Church.

In the days after the shooting, there has been a surprising lack of information from the authorities. On Thursday night, the police had not yet confirmed the identity of the armed man, widely reported by the Swedish media such as Rickard Andersson, 35, or any detail about his motive or the victims.

In a statement issued early on Tuesday, less than 24 hours after the attack, the police said the shooter did not seem motivated by any ideology. On Thursday, Anna Bergkvist, who runs police investigation, seemed to return the statement.

“Why they said that, I can’t comment,” he told the BBC. “We are seeing different reasons and we will declare it when we have it.”

Swedish police are generally cautious by appointing suspects during an investigation, but the absence of official information has contributed to a feeling of fear and uncertainty among the immigrant communities of Over in recent days.

“We are obtaining all our media information and I don’t know why,” said Nour Affram, 36, who was inside Risbergska school when the attack began.

“We need more information,” he said. “We don’t know why he did, why did he point to this school? Was he sick or was something else?”

Affram was waiting to enter class when he listened to people shouting that there was a shooter, something so incredible for her who thought at first was a joke.

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

Affram, who emigrated from Syria to Obebro as a child, said he was afraid for the first time to send three children to school in Sweden.

Zaki Aydin, 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, we have to be careful now,” he said.

Aydin used to have the doors of his classroom and the open church building when he taught. “Now we are closing them,” he said. “And yesterday I asked someone to stop outside to prevent someone who would no longer know to enter.”

One of the students of the school, Gabriel, 18, said that a “nightmare had come true” for Orebro.

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

In the absence of any official news about the reason, all that residents here in Orebro know that the murderer seems to have been a solitary white man and who went to a school with a large base of immigrant students.

Tomas Poletti Lundstrom, an academic researcher in racism at the University of Uppsala, who lives a few minutes from the attack site and listened to police helicopters to fly over his house on Tuesday, said that Orebro faced a “deeply horrible time.”

“You can really feel it everywhere, it is affecting everyone,” Lundstrom said. “We still do not know the motifs of the shooter, but we are living in a very racist moment and this is a school for many immigrants.”

The shootings like Risbergska were “the result of how our society looks at the time, how our politicians speak and how we talk about each other,” he said. “This is what happens when politicians talk about the way they speak at this time.”

At the cordoned entrance of the Risbergska School Early Thursday morning, people stopped to leave flowers, light candles or simply to stop and take the scene. From the street, you can clearly see the main door through which the murderer who appears to go from the classroom with a rifle was filmed.

Among those who came alone and stayed for a while with the collection of candles and flowers, the mayor of the city, John Johansson, who had made an official visit to the site the previous day next to the prime minister and the king and the queen, But they stopped there again. On his way to work on Thursday to present his respects.

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

But it wasn’t time to “speculate or hurry,” he said. “We do not want to contribute to any false rumor, so we hope the police will find answers as soon as possible.”

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

“It seems to be a Swedish guy, and maybe that is better than if he had been responsible for immigrants,” he added. “Of course, it is a terrible event in any way, but we do not want to add more fuel to the fire.”

Police have given limited information about their investigation. They said that some 130 officers responded to the shooting in total, and that they were received by a “hell” in school. They said they believe the gunman acted alone.

The family members, the old friends of the school have told the Swedish media that it had become an inmate in recent years and that they may have suffered psychological problems.

There have been complaints about the management of the case. The Bosnian ambassador Bojan Sosic, who also visited the shooting site, learned of the residents that a Bosnium was among the dead.

“I find it strange, to say the least, that the police choose to retain the information that refers to the foreign citizens of the respective embassies,” he said.

Others, including members of the Syrian community, said they trusted that the police were doing the right thing and only expected to learn sooner. Kasselia, the Syrian Orthodox priest, said that the community in general “does not know what the police are thinking, but we trust that they have their own plan.”

Hundreds of people arrived at the Church of Kasselia on Thursday night from Syrian, Turkish, Iraqi and other migrants. A photo of Salim Iskef, one of the victims of the shooting, sat in a easel. Children of the Congregation Hymns sung. Iskef’s family, sitting on a bank near the front, was consumed by pain.

It is difficult to understand why these types of attacks occur even when the reason is known. Without him, it is even more confusing. A few hours before the commemorative service began, Kasselia had been sitting in a bank in her empty church, trying to make sense.

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

There was some comfort when listening to the police that the gunman acted alone, Kasselia said. He left less anxiety from another attack.

“But this man had something in his heart, some kind of hatred, who gathered somewhere,” said the priest. “We cannot say that there are no others.”

Additional Phelan Chatterjee reports. Photographs of Joel Gunter.