The Swedish bomb squad were called to a shopping centre in the city of Kristianstad Monday after an explosive device was found outside a property.
Investigators described the homemade device as a “black powder bomb” and said that it was found in the area of the C4 Shopping centre at around 9:15 p.m., newspaper Kristianstadsbladet reports.
Local police 0n-duty investigator Peter Frostlund said that the bomb squad arrived and disarmed what he described as a “small explosive charge” and added that it was then sent away for forensic examination.
Kristianstad police spokesperson Robert Loeffel said that investigators were unsure as to how much damage the explosive device could have caused in the area and added that the placement may not have been the actual target for the explosive.
“Where it was found it doesn’t have to be the place where it was intended to be used,” he said, and noted that there was a possibility someone just wanted to get rid of the device. So far, police say they have no suspects in the case.
According to the paper, photographs showed the explosive appeared to be “bottle-shaped”. Other reports from elsewhere across Sweden have described homemade explosives places in thermos containers and are believed to be linked to the country’s rising problem with violence linked to organised crime.
The discovery of the explosive devices comes less than a month after police in the multicultural southern city of Malmö found several devices in and around an industrial area of the city. A witness described the objects as each looking like a thermos with white sticks attacked to them.
Bombings across Sweden have increased dramatically this year, leading Analyst Ylva Ehrlin of Sweden’s National Bomb Guard to comment: “We have ten million people in Sweden, but I have not found any equivalent of this level of explosions in any industrialised country.”