Norwegian police shoot knife-wielding attacker dead in Oslo

From the Norwegian edition of The Local and the Daily Mail

A man shot by police, after he threatened several people with a knife. has died. A policeman was also injured as the officers tried to arrest the attacker in the capital’s Bislett neighbourhood, police told a press conference.

“We’re not excluding any motives, but there is nothing at this stage that indicates this is a terror attack,” police inspector Egil Jorgen Brekke told reporters.  Footage posted by witnesses on social media and broadcast by Norwegiann media show the bare-chested suspect wielding a large knife on the pavement outside a shop.

A police car can be seen ramming the man into a building in a bid to stop him. The man then rushes the vehicle, opens the front passenger door and leans inside the car.

Video from the Norwegian newspaper Expressen here. The call of Allah Akbar is clear to my ears. 

“Police tried to run him down as he was attempting to stab someone. He then attacked the police with a knife… and shots were fired,” the head of the police operation, Tore Solberg, told reporters at an improvised press conference at the scene aired on public broadcaster NRK.

According to tabloid VG, the man was Russian and in his 30s, and had been sentenced to psychiatric care in December 2020 after stabbing a man in Oslo in 2019. The attacker was convicted over a similar semi-naked June 4, 2019 rampage where they stabbed a passer-by several times in the upper body. He had reportedly set fire to his clothes before charging five people with a knife.  The victim resisted and was aided by passersby who distracted the knifeman, helping the man survive the brutal attack.

The attacker, who reportedly shouted ‘allahu akbar’ during the 2019 assault, was shot by police with a stun gun as he was arrested.

At trial, court-appointed mental health experts disagreed over whether he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia or drug-induced psychosis, but both the prosecution and the defence agreed he should be sectioned to compulsory mental health care.

Local media reported he was also convicted for attacking two police officers in 2015 in an assault in which he told cops ‘you are going to die’ and called them ‘fascist b*******’.

He won’t rampage a fourth time. Not now.