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String of stabbings spreads to Oslo

January 5, 2012  

UPDATED: Three persons were stabbed on board an Oslo tram Thursday morning,  just a day after other stabbing incidents in Porsgrunn and Namsos, one of them fatal. The Oslo victims were all taken to hospital but none had life-threatening injuries. Two men were arrested, and one has since confessed.

Traffic had cleared and trams were running as usual less than an hour after the stabbings on board a tram at Solli Plass in Oslo on Thursday. PHOTO: Views and News

Police and ambulance crews arrived on the scene quickly after the tram’s conductor sent out a call for help around 10:30am. The stabbings occurred on board a Jar-bound tram at Solli Plass in the city’s affluent Frogner district, where many foreign embassies are located.

All three victims were employees of the public transit system and on board to check the validity of passengers’ tickets, according to Cato Asperud of transit agency Oslotrikken.

“It occurred during an ordinary ticket control,” Asperud told dagbladet.no. “A man suddenly pulled out a knife and started waving it around on the tram before he went on the attack.”

Asperud said three of the four ticket monitors on board were injured. Their injuries weren’t serious, but all were taken to local hospitals.

The tram conductor himself restrained one of the suspects in the case and police arrested him at the scene. An alleged accomplice, described as around 190 centimeters tall, heavy-set and wearing workclothes with a backback, left the scene, spurring a massive manhunt. Police sought tips from the public, but by early afternoon the suspect had turned himself in to police at a downtown station.

Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reported on Friday that the two men are from Cuba and Chile, 35 and 45 years old respectively, but the older man can’t be tied to the stabbing. He claimed, and witnesses confirmed, that he left the tram before the stabbing occurred. The 35-year-old, however, has acknowledged the stabbing and would appear at a custody hearing on Saturday. Police remained uncertain of his identity, or his residence status in Norway.

Namsos victim died
Meanwhile, in Namsos, a woman living at a public housing complex for persons with special needs was stabbed in her own residence on Wednesday by an unknown assailant. The victim, age 36, was rushed to hospital, first in Namsos and then by helicopter to St Olavs Hospital in Trondheim, but she died of her injuries on Thursday.

Police initially arrested another woman at the complex but later released her after questioning by investigators for the Nord-Trøndelag Police District. Police found a knife at the scene that’s believed to be the murder weapon, and the national crime unit Kripos was called in to assist in the murder probe.

A woman in her 50s, also a resident of the housing complex, has since been arrested and charged in the fatal stabbing. Both the alleged assailant and the victim suffered mental health problems and the murder suspect was in the custody of medical personnel while the investigation continued.

Another attacker posed as delivery man
Earlier on Wednesday, a young woman was attacked and stabbed by a man who rang her doorbell at her home in Porsgrunn, on the coast about two hours southwest of Oslo. The woman told police she had no idea who her attacker was, but that he’d said he had a package to deliver and was dressed in clothing resembling a postal uniform.

He ran off after attacking her with a knife. She was treated for what police described as minor injuries to her hand and throat.

The incident was nonetheless considered serious and under investigation by the Telemark Police District.

Views and News from Norway/Nina Berglund

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  • http://twitter.com/vingori Vineet

    Gosh !!

    Can’t believe it, it’s time that the police gets its act together.

  • MrLeeLee

    Horrible news. Unfortunately not shocking though. Especially where Oslo is concerned.
    I moved from there in August and will never return.
    It is over-run with junkies, asylum seekers and degenerates. A sad state of affairs indeed. Norway must act fast if it is to avoid becoming like the UK.

    • Southernfjord

      Thank goodness you left. I feel safer knowing there’s one less prejudiced individual in town.

    • NorwayExpat123

      Yeah, curse those pesky asylum seekers, they should have known better than to be born in war-zones. If it were you in that situation you would just stick it out in the crossfire like a champ and not seek a better life for yourself elsewhere. If you did in fact escape the war-zone, you would be a perfectly well adjusted and educated member of society overnight.

      By the way, the junkies are often ethnic Norwegians, and the dealers of “drugs” (most of which are less dangerous than alcohol) are friendlier than the average British bartender. The record for the most heinous crime in Norway still belongs to an ethnic Norwegian, who shared your disdain for immigrants.

  • Roberto

    I think you can’t really avoid any of this kind of violence just by increasing security, no matter how many policemen are on patrol. This sort of criminals are individuals that can’t be controlled since you can’t suspect from every pedestrian.

    As for the junkies in Oslo: compared to what I’m used to I found them even friendly… after all, I grew up in the 80′s in a neighbourhood where nearly half the teenagers passed away due to heroin overdose, so violence and drug addicts were anywhere.

    I don’t actually mean Oslo’s junkies can’t pose a threat, but I felt quite safe around there. Just try to name any other place were suspects turn themselves in. Fortunately, the worst from Oslo is still far from being something like, let’s say, Lewisham Borough or Willesden Junction area in London.

    • MattAusinLondon

      Fair call about comparison to parts of London, but these junkies inhabit the same equivalent areas in Oslo as say Hyde Park or Regents St and that is the problem. At least in London you can easily avoid those areas. It’s not so easy to avoid Central Station in oslo if you’re in town!

      • http://profile.yahoo.com/2EDK5RZJURLTGVDQAF3QLBLLUE vanessa

        It’s true, is wrong to compare Oslo with London, or any other big city from Europe, where the sizes are the double or triple of this city, and the amount of crime is almost the same, just make numbers, the possibilities are higher if you walk in the Central Station (which is one of the busiest areas) than if you avoid a bad street in London! I just think of this, why it keeps happening in the same places? simple, the police is not doing their job, if they stay vigilant none of this would happen, but since they’re not “everywhere”, clearly they must increase the number of police officers, and Norway has to prepare for the increasing of population!

        • Martin Schmidt

          I don`t think the situation in Oslo is very different from other cities, it`s just that everyone is more talking about it.
          Oslo is a safe city, but newspaers like this one make Oslo and Norway unsafe.
          Just compare the crime numbers:
          Take a look at the norwegian and the swedish statistics for example. Then you`ll find out that the situation is much worse in Stockholm.
          Or lets take the homicide rates:
          http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-SF-10-058/EN/KS-SF-10-058-EN.PDF
          rate per 100.000 population:
          Brussles 3,2, Prague 3,06, Berlin 1,31, Dublin 2,26, Dublin 2,14, London 2,17, Helsinki 2,01, OSLO: 1,76 – thats not better or worse than in other cities.
          Or lets take the city of Malmö: – just 2011:
          14 bombs (!), 29 shootings (!) – and Malmö is much smaller than Oslo.
          Or in my region in Germany: stabbing, burning cars a.s.o. – like in Oslo. But is it unsafe to life here? Not at all!
          So stop making it worse than it is!
          Martin

          • Roberto

            Or you could take another example: Madrid is not an extremely safe city, but it seems safer than it actually is because people don’t care about reporting crimes (and when you do, police doesn’t always show), so statistics are way far from the truth. Whenever I’ve been to Oslo I’ve always felt quite safe almost anywhere, even being obviously spot as an alien (which always makes an easier goal for criminals).

  • Gibcdi

    With regard to the Oslo Trikk incident- I recommend people read today’s article in Aftenposten “Sjekket Billeter-Ble Knivstukket” on Page 7. The three rent-a-cops got shanked because of their stupidity and arrogance plus they just happened be unlucky to get two people who were probably criminals since they where carrying knives.

    The article state that while the Securitas guards stopped the two men, and one showed ID and his buddy ran away getting off at the Solli station, cause no one wants a ticket. Even thought the Ruter official explicitly says in the article that the guards are supposed to back off from physical confrontation. There was a brawl and one or both men whipped out a knife and stabbed these rent-a-cops in the leg.

    While I am not condoning not paying your fines or stabbing anyone, these hired thugs basically chased the man who didnt show out onto the streets, in complete disregard for their “professional training”, comming to blows and basically had the bad luck of tangoing with the wrong people, since they happened to be armed. I feel no pity any of the borderline-retarded.

    Why didnt the rent a cops just mail the ticket to the guy who showed his ID and follow up on identifying the other guy? They had one of the two dude’s ID, afterall, and that is the procedure that you dont have to pay on the spot. Second, its stupid to have 3 out of 4 rent-a-cops basically mug a dude over failure to pay a 40 kroner ticket. They happened to get a couple of dudes who are probably criminal, since why is anyone carrying weapons on the trikk? Doesn’t any other passanger feel unsafe now? And that the actions of these “guards” put the rest of the passangers in harms’ way.

    Also on the matter of civil liberties, is anyone else bothered by the civil rights infringment of having jack-booted thugs who think they are on COPS jumping civilians for MINOR traffic violations? And that if the men hadnt had weapons, they would have basically been jumped or jossled with impunity over a ticket that could have been mailed, if procedure had been followed? I’ve had experience with these state-hired traffic bouncers, who storm in like the Gestapo and who are frankly rude, impatient (a woman’s purse takes time to forage through).

    And frankly…if they have to employ those methods to recover revenues for public transportation, they should redesign the system so that people cant evade fees that easily. It’s doable, and as simple as having everyone file up in front and scan the card in front of the driver, before the bus pulls away from the curb. It will also mean delays and a whole other set of complaints but that’s another topic.

    • AlexB

      GIBCDI – i was witness to something very similar when 5 of the traffic bouncers mobbed a lady. It was shocking.. and all i can say maybe maybe they asked for it..