A FAR-RIGHT extremist brandishing a sword killed a teacher and student in an attack on a school in Sweden yesterday, in what police called one of the worst events in the country's history.
Wearing a Nazi helmet and a Darth Vader mask and holding a sword covered in blood, pupils thought the killer was in Hallowe'en costume and posed for pictures with him seconds before he stabbed their teacher.
The attacker, named locally as 21-year-old Anton Lundin-Pettersson, then walked from classroom to classroom looking for victims at Kronan school in Trollhattan, near Gothenburg - an area with a high immigrant population.
A teaching assistant died at the scene, and an 11-year-old boy died later in hospital from stab wounds. Two more students were in a critical condition last night. The attacker was fatally shot by police.
Laith, a 14-year-old student at the school who witnessed the attack, said neither pupils nor staff initially realised what was happening.
"When we first saw him we thought it was a joke. He had a mask and black clothes and a long sword," he told Sweden's state broadcaster SVT. "There were pupils who wanted to take pictures with him and feel the sword."
One young student, Sara, who took a photograph with the attacker said she had no idea that the blood on the blade was real.
She said she heard her teacher say: "You are scaring the children, get away from here."
Sara said: "He just nodded, then he plunged the knife into the teacher's right side. The last thing I heard him say was 'call an ambulance'.
"After that he hunted us through the school. He was playing strange music and didn't say a word. It was terrifying music, sort of Hallowe'en music."
Police shot Lundin-Pettersson in the chest within minutes of arriving. He died in hospital yesterday afternoon. Lundin-Pettersson's social media profiles revealed Right-wing and anti-immigration sympathies.
YouTube videos he shared speak of the "multicultural project from hell", rue the "Jewish media control of Western civilisation", and underline "the importance of race in society". A day before his attack, he "liked" the song When Evil Speaks by the Belgian electro-industrial group Suicide Commando. He also watched a video collage of Nazi military footage from the Second World War.
His neighbour Liv Ringstrom told The Daily Telegraph that there was nothing about Lundin-Pettersson to suggest he was capable of such a terrible crime. "I meet him in the stairwell and he always seems very nice and very friendly. I've no idea if he could have done it," she said.
Swedish police last night were yet to officially confirm Lundin-Pettersson's identify, although The Daily Telegraph has established that he lived at the address they searched earlier in the afternoon. "We have raided the perpetrator's home and we have found things there that are interesting, but we do not want to go into that now," said Thord Haraldsson, a criminal commissioner with the Swedish polic.
Swedish prime minister Stefan Lofven pledged to help support the bereaved and the pupils and staff at the school. "This is a dark day for Sweden," he said.