OSLO, Norway – Two people were killed and at least 14 injured early Saturday morning in central Oslo when a gunman opened fire outside two nightclubs and a diner, a police official said. .
A male suspect was arrested five minutes after the shooting was reported, Oslo police said on Twitter. Tore Barstad, a police chief who spoke to reporters about the incident, did not identify a suspect or speculate on a motive.
One of two nightclubs, the London Pub, is the hub of Oslo’s gay nightlife. The city’s annual Pride Parade takes place on a Saturday, and it usually marks a festival that begins in the summer.
Olav Rønneberg, a crime reporter for the Norwegian public broadcaster, NRK, happened to be in the area when the violence began. “I saw a man come to the scene with a bag, he grabbed a gun and started shooting,” he said Sockets.
Shootings are extremely rare in Norway, a country of 5 million people with a capital located next to the picturesque fjord.
Gun owners must be licensed and take safety classes, and a semi-automatic weapons ban enacted by the Norwegian Parliament – a response to the 2011 attack by a far-right gunman that left 77 people die – took effect last year.
The 2011 attack began when gunman Anders Behring Breivik detonated a fertilizer bomb in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then killed 69 people, most of them teenagers, in a mass shooting rampage at a political summer camp.
Mr Breivik received a 21-year prison sentence for the attacks, the maximum amount under Norwegian law. He was denied pardon in February by a Norwegian court saying that he “appears to have no empathy and compassion for the victims of the terrorist attack.”
Over the past decade, the country has had to account for the trauma of the massacre. The people who lived near the island where it happened had disagreements about the construction of a permanent public memorial at a nearby harbor. The families of the victims support it, but some residents say the memorial risks turning the area into a tragedy tourist destination.
Mike Ives Contribution report from Seoul.
