Police are treating the bombing of a residential building in Anderstorp in southern Sweden as attempted murder.
The explosion occurred at around six o’clock in the morning outside of the building. with police being alerted to the incident at 6:04 am and arriving and securing the scene at 7:30 am.
According to investigators, the explosion is being treated as an attempted murder. They say there were several people at the home at the time of the explosion, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.
“There are parts of the wall that are clearly damaged, so it was a powerful detonation,” said police officer Thomas Agnevik.
“There were people in the house. Exactly how many I do not know. I only have information that they are unhurt,” he added.
Local resident Aisha Darwih, who lives next to the building where the explosion occurred, said the noise from the blast woke up her entire family.
“I first thought it was a car that exploded,” she said and went on to say that nothing like it had ever happened in the area before, and said she had “no idea” why the building was bombed.
The incident comes just over a week after two similar explosions occurred in residential areas in the southern heavily migrant populated city of Malmö.
Explosions, particularly from hand grenades, have become a major issue in Sweden over the last decade with the country seeing 116 hand grenade attacks in the last eight years. “It is extreme in a country that is not in war,” said gang crime expert Gunnar Appelgren.
While most attacks have been directed towards residential areas and criminal gang rivals, some have also targetted police officers including the bombing of a police station in Helsingborg in October last year and a grenade attack on police officers in Uppsala a month later.
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