A man in his 40s was rushed to a local hospital in the Swedish city of Västerås following an explosion at an apartment building in which he is believed to be the suspected bomber.
The explosion took place in the Skiljebo area of Västerås at an apartment building, with police being alerted to the blast at around 2:28 am on Thursday morning.
“One person was found injured outside the apartment, in the stairwell,” local police officer Stefan Persson said and the local prosecutor’s office has stated that the man was very seriously injured as a result of the blast, newspaper Aftonbladet reports.
The newspaper claims that sources state the man may have been handling the explosive substance TATP, a powerful explosive that has been favoured by the so-called Islamic State terrorist group. In 2018, it was revealed that the 2017 Barcelona terror attackers had amassed nearly 450 lbs of TATP and intended to set off the explosives in Paris as part of a truck bomb.
Daniel Vinge, an officer at the police’s regional command centre, initially told broadcaster SVT, “What caused the explosion is currently unclear. One person has been injured in the explosion and taken to hospital.”
Later in the day, however, prosecutor Carl-Johan Norström stated that explosives had been found and investigators were working on the theory that the explosives had detonated by accident while attempting to build a bomb.
Last year, it was reported that Sweden saw over 80 explosions and while the number was a decrease from the previous year, it was still far higher than any of the country’s neighbours.
Marie Borgh, section manager at Sweden’s National Bomb Protection, a division of the Swedish police, stated that many of the bombings and explosions were linked to gang crime.
“Today we can clearly see that there are several bomb cases that belong together, that the bombs were built by the same person. One of our main focuses is to try to find those people and thus stay one step ahead,” Borgh said in December.