2 killed, several wounded in Sweden

STOCKHOLM:Two men were killed and more than 10 wounded after gunmen burst into a cafe firing automatic weapons in a suspected gang-related attack in the Swedish city of Gothenburg.
Customers in the cafe were watching football on television late Wednesday when at least two gunmen, reportedly wearing skeleton masks and yellow high-visibility vests, launched their shooting spree.
“We are assuming that this is gang-related and not a terrorist attack,” police spokesman Bjoer Blixter told AFP.
“We’ve had similar problems with shootings for several years but never of this magnitude.”
A manhunt is under way for the assailants who fled by car after the shooting in a predominantly immigrant area of Sweden’s second city.
Gothenburg police said they have launched a murder investigation and are questioning a large number of people but no arrests have been made.
“They aimed directly at people... at their heads,” a cafe employee told the Aftonbladet tabloid of the attack.
Blixter said two people aged 20 and 25 died and between 10 and 15 others were wounded, but the death toll could rise. The injured were aged between 20 and 60.
Aftonbladet quoted the mother of the 20-year-old who was shot dead, who said he had only dropped by the combined cafe and restaurant to collect takeaway food. “He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said.
Sahlgrenska University Hospital said it was treating eight people, including one with life-threatening injuries and two in a serious but stable condition.
Sweden and neighboring Denmark have a longstanding problem with criminal gangs, including Hells Angels, Bandidos and several immigrant groups battling for control of the local drugs trade and protection rackets.
The shooting fitted a pattern of regular tit-for-tat retributions between rival gangs in areas with high immigrant populations in Gothenburg, which lies on Sweden’s southwestern coast and has a population of 550,000.
Regional police chief Klas Friberg said officers had been “on their toes” lately because of an uptick in reports of gang clashes.
“We have different types of criminal gangs which are prepared to... use extreme violence in revenge attacks or to increase their share of the criminal market,” he told reporters.
One witness told Aftonbladet that two people entered the cafe in the suburb of Biskopsgaarden armed with weapons that looked like Kalashnikovs and started shooting.
Another witness said the attack was 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.
According to local newspaper GP, there were a total of 52 shootings in Gothenburg last year, of which four were fatal. In the past 18 months, police said they had seized almost 200 weapons, including 50 automatic weapons as part of an anti-gang operation.
In 2010, Biskopsgaarden became one of the first areas in Sweden to mount video surveillance cameras in public places because of the high level of crime in the neighborhood of 12,000 people, according to the municipality.
In some parts of Biskopsgaarden, 80 percent of inhabitants are of immigrant origin.
Home Affairs Minister Anders Ygeman told news agency TT that gang crime had become a social problem and that “no one who goes out to a restaurant in Sweden should have to worry about ending-up in a bloodbath.”
Sweden, which has a population of 9.5 million, is generally a tranquil country and gun-related deaths are uncommon.