Deaths in Norway attack were due to stab wounds, not bow and arrow, police say

Article content

OSLO – Five people killed in a small Norwegian town last week were all stabbed and not shot with a bow and arrows as initially suspected, police said Monday.

Article content

Four women and one man, ages 52 to 78, were killed in the Oct. 13 attacks in Kongsberg, a city about 70 kilometers (40 miles) west of the capital Oslo.

Three people were also injured, including an off-duty police officer who was shot with a bow and arrow in the opening phase of the 35-minute riot.

But the assailant later appeared to have discarded this weapon, investigators said.

“Five people were killed by stab weapons,” Police Inspector Per Thomas Omholt told a news conference.

He declined to say if they were knives or larger weapons.

“Some were killed inside their own homes, others in public,” Omholt said.

Last Wednesday, the police had said that a man “armed” with a bow and arrow had committed the murders. They later added that other weapons were also involved. Omholt did not say why it had taken six days to clarify which weapon was used.

Witnesses have described to Reuters how they fled for their lives as the attack unfolded.

Investigators believe the only suspect in the case, named by police last week as Espen Andersen Braathen, 37, is mentally ill and is currently being held in a closed psychiatric facility.

The death toll was the worst of any attack in Norway since 2011, when far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, most of them teenagers, in a youth camp.