OSLO: A gunmanarmed with multiple weapons opened fire in a mosque near the Norwegian capitalOslo yesterday, injuring one person before being overpowered by an elderlyworshipper, police and witnesses said. The head of the mosque described theassailant, who was later arrested by police, as white and said he was wearing ahelmet and a uniform. Police were alerted to the shooting at the al-NoorIslamic centre in the Oslo suburb of Baerum shortly after 4 pm (1400 GMT)."There has been a shooting episode inside the mosque,” Oslo police said onTwitter.
Police firstreported that the victim had been shot, but later said one person had sustained"minor injuries” and that it was unclear if they were gunshot wounds. Norwaywas the scene of one of the worst-ever attacks by a rightwing extremist in July2011, when 77 people were killed by Anders Behring Breivik. Police said therewas no indication that more people than the "young man” arrested were involvedin yeterday’s incident, but that they had no further information about thesuspect.
‘Blood on thecarpets’
"One of ourmembers has been shot by a white man with a helmet and uniform,” Irfan Mushtaq,head of the mosque, told local newspaper Budstikka. Mushtaq told anotherNorwegian newspaper, VG, that the man had carried multiple weapons, but that hehad been subdued by a member of the mosque. Mushtaq said he had arrived at thescene shortly after being alerted about the gunman, and had gone to the back ofthe building while waiting for police to arrive. "Then I see that there arecartridges scattered and blood on the carpets, and I see one of our members issitting on the perpetrator, covered in blood,” Mushtaq told VG.
He said the manwho apparently overpowered the shooter was 75 years old and had been readingthe Holy Quran after a prayer session. According to Mushtaq, the mosque had notreceived any threats ahead of the shooting. The Norwegian Police SecurityService (PST) said it was monitoring the situation. "We’re following the eventsand are continuingly evaluating. It’s to early to draw any conclusions,” MartinBernsen, information director at PST, told public broadcaster NRK.
There has beenrecent spate of white nationalist attacks in the West, including in the UnitedStates and in New Zealand where 51 Muslim worshippers were killed in March inshootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch. The al-Noor Islamiccentre in Norway shares its name with the worst affected mosque in the NewZealand attacks. Budstikka said it had contacted the mosque in in March afterthe Christchurch massacre and that officials there had said security would betightened.
The suspect inthe Christchurch killings wrote a hate-filled manifesto in which he said he wasinfluenced by far-right ideologues including the Norwegian mass murdererBreivik. Breivik, who said he was motivated by his hatred of multiculturalism,detonated a massive bomb in Oslo that killed eight people and then opened fireon a gathering of the Labour Party’s youth wing on the island of Utoya, killinganother 69 people, most of them teenagers. – AFP