Sweden Mass Shooting Site Was Foundational in a Diverse Community

One typical day, the Risberg Education Center in the Swedish city of Orebro would be tormented with students who gathered to attend classes in subjects such as buildings, children and Swedish for immigrants.

On Wednesday, the day after a mass cracking left at least 11 people dead And she sent shock waves across Sweden, the school was empty as the community reconciled with violence, and some were waiting for news about the fate of their loved ones.

“These people who were killed here dreamed of becoming doctors, nurses, engineers, plumbers or something else,” said Shams Ulqamar Andesh, standing outside the campus where he spent four years learning Sweden.

Mr Andesh, 42, moved to Sweden from Afghanistan in 2012. His time at the Education Center helped him to do his job as a truck driver for a national postal service, and his wife became assistant nurses after attending classes there.

“That was my school,” he said.

Mr. Andesh was among a few inhabitants and former students who gathered near the school, placing flowers and candles on the sidewalk or staring at a building that now described the center of what the leaders of Sweden described as the worst mass shooting in the history of the country.

Police cordonated the campus blue and white ribbon to keep the public away from the current crime scene under investigation, and several officers stood guards around the yellow brick building.

Mr. Andesh said he was a close family friend taken to a nearby hospital after being shot on the attack. “We wait to hear from her doctor what’s going on next,” he said.

The university city with a 13th -century castle, Orebbro is 120 miles west of Stockholm and about 180 miles from Oslo, the capital of neighboring Norway. In recent years, Orebbro has become a home of immigrants from 165 countries with 160,000 inhabitants, According to the municipality website.

The Risberg Education Center, which meets about 2,000 students and offers vocational classes and lessons for adults who have studied a high school diploma, has become fundamental to newly stalled immigrants, they said there on Wednesday.

The younger son Kathryn and Lars Banck, who has Down syndrome, attends special classes at school at school and was supposed to attend English classes in campus on Tuesday, but canceled before the attack. Their older son attended school when she was a high school.

“It’s tragic,” said Mrs. Banck, 72, a native of Boston as she set up a candle in front of the school. “It’s like now -a”

As Sweden faces one of the highest rates of the European Union weapons violence, Orebbro also recorded an increase in it – together with a public discussion that he encouraged in Sweden.

“We had a lot of incidents,” Mr. Banck said. “But none of this size

Rolf Lidski, who teaches sociology at Orebbro University, said in a telephone conversation that he saw in his over 40 years of living there that the city was becoming richer and more diverse, but also unequally and segregated.

Mr. Lidski said the residents of the city also became more open to more severely police measures and security.

The authorities did not determine the attacker’s motive, but Mr. Lidsky said that he felt a relief after police reports suggested that the attacker was probably a lone wolf, not part of the gang – a sign that deadly violence could be an isolated episode.

“Maybe it could only be a very, very sad memory,” he said.