Four people were injured in a stabbing incident near a shopping mall in Finland’s Tampere city on Thursday, police said, adding that one person has been arrested and there is no indication of a terror or racial motive behind the attack.
A police statement gave no further details on the injuries from the attack in the Nordic country’s third largest city but said the situation was under control and there was no further threat to the public.
“According to (our) current information, there is no reason to suspect that the act had a terrorist or racist motive,” police said later in an update that gave no information on the arrested suspect.
Public broadcaster YLE earlier reported that traffic in the centre of Tampere – located some 180 kilometres (112 miles) north of the capital Helsinki – was at a standstill.
The daily Ilta-Sanomat reported that a witness saw bystanders giving first aid to two people lying on the ground at the time police arrived, and that, according to its information, the person arrested was a Finnish man in his twenties.
Recent Attacks
In May, three pupils were injured in an attack at a school in southern Finland and a fellow student suspected of carrying out the assault was apprehended.
Last year, a 12-year-old boy shot dead a fellow sixth-grader and severely injured two others at a school in the town of Vantaa. The boy said he had been a target of bullying and that this had motivated his attack.
Germany Attack
A man attacked and injured four people on Thursday on a high-speed train in southern Germany around 70 kilometres (43.5 miles) from the Austrian border before being arrested, police said.
The ICE 91 train was carrying around 500 passengers from Hamburg in northern Germany to the Austrian capital Vienna. The man was arrested and the rail line shut down, a police statement said.
“Today at around 1:55 p.m., (1155 GMT) a man injured several people with dangerous objects on an ICE train heading towards Vienna shortly before Strasskirchen,” a statement from police in the southern state of Bavaria said.
The attacker was also injured, police said.
(With inputs from Reuters)
