Witnesses recall horror of Sweden’s worst school shooting

Ali el Mokad, a relative of a man who is believed to have been studying at the school at the time of the attack, had positioned himself outside of a local hospital waiting to hear on his relatives’ condition.

“It doesn’t feel very good actually,” Mr Mokad told Reuters news agency. He said that his cousin also knew someone at the school, and when she called her friend earlier, “she fell to the ground because she was crying so much”.

“She thought what she saw was so terrible. She only saw people lying on the floor, injured and blood everywhere,” Mr Mokad said, describing the scene his cousin’s friend had witnessed.

Such attacks are very rare in Sweden. While there have been school shootings in Sweden before, they have not been of this magnitude.

Last September, there was a school shooting south of Stockholm, when a 15-year-old is suspected to have wounded a classmate – although that attack was linked to Sweden’s problem of gang violence.