Two killed in Sweden pub shooting – police

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Two men were killed and more than 10 were wounded after gunmen opened fire in a pub in a suspected gang-related attack in the Swedish city of Gothenburg late Wednesday, March 18, police said.

Customers inside the bar were watching football on television when the shootings took place.

“Two died and between 10 and 15 were wounded,” police spokesman Bjoer Blixte told Agence France-Presse, adding that up to 4 of those injured were in a serious but stable condition.

“We are assuming that this is gang-related and not a terrorist attack,” he said.

“We’ve had similar problems with shootings for several years but never of this magnitude.”

Sweden and neighboring Denmark have a longstanding problem with criminal gangs, including Hells Angels, Bandidos and several immigrant groups which battle for control of the local drug trade.

The shooting fitted a pattern of regular tit-for-tat retributions between rival gangs in areas with high immigrant populations in Gothenburg, Sweden’s third-largest city.

The gunmen fled the scene by car and police are still hunting for them.

An eyewitness told the Aftonbladet tabloid that two people entered the pub in the Gothenburg suburb of Biskopsgaarden armed with weapons that looked like Kalashnikovs and started shooting.

Another witness said the shootings were over quickly. 

“I didn’t have time to think what was happening. Then I saw that my friend was bleeding. I tried to stop the flow of blood as well as I could with my hands,” a man who gave his name as “Rocky” told public broadcaster SVT.

There have been dozens of gang-related shootings in Gothenburg in recent years, many of them in the Biskopsgaarden area, a housing estate with a large immigrant population and high unemployment, but fatalities are relatively rare. 

A man was shot dead in an apartment in the area in May last year and two others died in suspected gang-related shootings during an upsurge in violence in late 2013.

In January a man was shot in the leg close to the scene of Wednesday’s shooting.

“It’s frightening. Things happen nearly every day here but this looks like something extra,” one local resident who did not give her name told Aftonbladet.

However another resident said the area around the pub was usually quiet. 

“This is actually a quiet area… there have been occasional shootings but never anything serious. It’s all between gangs,” she said.

Police have launched a murder investigation and are questioning “a large number of people”. No arrests have been made. – Tom Sullivan, AFP / Rappler.com