STOCKHOLM – A suicide bomber who blew himself up in Stockholm at the weekend was carrying a cocktail of explosives and probably meant to wreak carnage among Christmas shoppers, investigators said Monday.
As police searched the father-of-three's home near London, Sweden's chief prosecutor confirmed investigators believed the bomber was a Swedish citizen who lived in Britain and was bent on killing "as many people as possible".
After an Islamist group said Taymour Abdelwahab targeted Sweden on Saturday over its military presence in Afghanistan, prosecution chief Tomas Lindstrand warned the bomber would likely have had accomplices.
While the results of DNA tests were still needed for confirmation, Lindstrand told reporters he was "98 percent" certain of the bomber's identity but was trying to work out his eventual target before he blew himself up prematurely.
"He had a bomb belt on him, he had a backpack with a bomb and he was carrying an object that has been compared to a pressure cooker. If it had all blown up at the same time, it would have been very powerful," he said.
"Where he was headed ... we don't know. It is likely that something happened, that he made some kind of mistake that led to part of the bombs he was carrying went off and caused his death.
"This was during Christmas shopping in central Stockholm and he was extremely well-equipped when it came to bomb material ... It is not much of a stretch to say he was going to a place with as many people as possible."
While it had been established the suspect carried out the attack alone, investigators "have to assume he worked with several people," Lindstrand told AFP.
Abdelwahab, who would have been 29 the day after the blasts, was reportedly born in Iraq but investigators said he became a Swedish citizen 18 years ago and had never come to the attention of the security services.
In London a spokesman for the city's Metropolitan Police said officers raided a property in nearby Luton late Sunday as part of the investigation.
The chairman of a mosque in Luton where the suspected bomber used to worship said that Abdelwahab was a "bubbly" character known for his hardline views before he "stormed out" for good when tackled about them in 2007.
"I had to confront him three or four times because his views were so extreme," Qadeer Baksh told AFP.
"He was saying physical jihad was an obligation for all Muslims and saying that Muslim scholars are unreliable and untrustworthy because they are in the pockets of governments," he added.
"I am shocked because I never imagined he would go this far."
Luton has seen clashes between Islamic and far-right extremists in recent years, and in 2005 the four suicide bombers who killed 52 people on London's transport system met up there to make their way into the capital.
An Islamist website, Shumukh al-Islam, posted a purported will by Abdelwahab which said he was fulfilling a threat by Al-Qaeda in Iraq to attack Sweden.
On Saturday Sweden's Saepo intelligence agency and the TT news agency received an email with audio files in which a man now believed to be the bomber is heard saying: "all hidden mujahedeen in Europe, and especially in Sweden, it is now the time to fight back."
The message referred to the Swedish army's presence in Afghanistan and to Swedish artist Lars Vilks, the object of numerous threats since his drawing of the Prophet Mohammed was first published in 2007.
"The Swedish people are being warned for not having handled me ... This is a way of laying on collective responsibility," Vilks told AFP.
"I have received many calls and emails from people accusing me of having put the Swedish people in this situation, saying it is my fault," he said.
Meanwhile seven bomb experts from the FBI, the US agency, are on their way to Sweden to assist with the probe, Saepo said.
Saturday's bombings were seen by the Swedish media as a wake-up call and evidence that the country is the target of international terrorism.
"Openness under attack," Aftonbladet titled on its editorial page while the daily Dagens Nyheter described Saturday's events as "an attack on us all."
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