A bomb blast tore through central Oslo, shattering windows at the prime minister’s office and leaving at least seven people dead, shortly before a gunman killed at least nine others on an island near the Norwegian capital, police said.
Acting Police Chief Sveinung Sponheim said a 32-year-old Norwegian man was arrested on the island of Utoeya, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Oslo. Police think the same person may be behind the bombing and the shootings on the island, Sponheim said at a news conference in Oslo.
The Oslo blast was reported at 3:26 p.m. local time, police said. How long afterward the shooting began on Utoeya wasn’t immediately known.
Prime Minister and Labor Party leader Jens Stoltenberg wasn’t at his office today when the bomb went off. The attack was “cowardly,” he told reporters later, and said the government will function although buildings were heavily damaged.
Stoltenberg had been due to appear tomorrow at a Labor Party youth gathering on Utoeya, where about nine or 10 people were gunned down, Sponheim said. The death toll probably will rise, he said.
The suspected shooter, who wore a police uniform, wasn’t a police officer, he said.
The attacks are the deadliest in Europe since bomb blasts at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport in January left at least 37 people dead.
Norway Targeted
Today’s bombing, for which there was no credible claim of responsibility, marks the first time Oslo has suffered such an attack. Three terrorist suspects with possible ties to al-Qaeda were arrested last year in Norway.
“There could be a lot of theories on who is behind this, but our first suspicions are directed towards al-Qaeda because leaders of the network have, on multiple occasions, put Norway on the list of targets,” Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, said by phone. “Two factors that have contributed to this are Norway’s role in the war on terror and in Afghanistan in particular.”
U.S. intelligence agencies are checking whether al-Qaeda can be linked to the attacks, said a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. So far, no determination has been made whether al-Qaeda or any other known terrorist group was involved, the official said.
NATO Mission
Norway, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has about 500 troops in Afghanistan. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he condemns “in the strongest possible terms the heinous acts of violence in Norway.” They were “cruel and cowardly,” he said.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said he contacted Stoltenberg to convey his condolences. “From a Swedish perspective, we’re following the ongoing development,” he said. “There is still a lot that is unclear about what has happened.”
Neighboring Sweden had a brush with what police treated as a possible terror attack in December, after a suicide bomber injured two people in central Stockholm.
Danish security police have been on heightened alert since 2006 after the country’s biggest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Those images were reprinted in several Norwegian papers.
Obama Reacts
U.S. President Barack Obama, said “the entire international community has a stake in preventing this kind of terror” and must cooperate “on intelligence and in terms of preventing these kinds of horrible attacks.”
Obama, who spoke to reporters after a meeting with New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, was briefed by his national security adviser for homeland security, John Brennan, according to spokesman Tommy Vietor.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen sent a statement conveying his “deepest sympathy and solidarity” with the Norwegian people. U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague described the bombing in a press release as “horrific.”
Before the explosion, a car drove into the government quarter, the police said in a statement. No government ministers were hurt, Stoltenberg told broadcaster NRK.
Eirik Borg, a back office worker at stock brokerage Fearnley Fonds based near the scene, said he saw smoke billowing from the government quarter after hearing the blast.
“We felt the impact very hard throughout the building,” Borg said in a phone interview. “All the windows were breaking and we actually thought lightning hit our roof. From our terrace, we saw white smoke.”
Stocks, Currency Hit
The bombing initially sent Norway’s currency and stocks lower. The krone weakened as much as 1 percent against the dollar and was trading 0.4 percent lower at 8:30 p.m. local time. Against the euro, the krone was little changed at 7.7851 after losing as much as 0.4 percent. The benchmark OBX stock index fell as much as 0.4 percent before closing little changed.
“Large sections of the center of Oslo have been evacuated and the police are urging people to stay away from the center of the city and limit their use of mobile phones,” the police said in a statement. Sponheim said police don’t expect further blasts.
The country’s Ministry of Petroleum suffered “massive damage” as a consequence of the blast, spokesman Haakon Smith- Isaksen said by phone. Norway is the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter.
“There was a huge explosion, the windows just blew out,” Smith-Isaken said. “There is much debris, people are injured. It was like a grenade explosion.”
Norway’s government will hold an emergency meeting tonight to discuss how to handle the attacks, Stoltenberg told NRK.
