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Russian suspected in alleged terror attack in Oslo examined by psychiatrists

The attacker was a 20-year-old man from the Russian region of Bashkortostan

MOSCOW, January 19. /TASS/. The Norwegian police’s Security Service (PST) will request a mental examination for the Russian man who on Thursday stabbed a woman in a supermarket in central Oslo, police attorney Anne Karoline Bekken Staff said on Saturday after a meeting with the suspect’s lawyer.

"We will ask for psychiatric tests," Bekken Staff said cited by the Verdens Gang daily.

When asked about the time for the examination, the attorney added that "it was still early to talk about it." PST asks to remand the detainee in custody for four weeks without the right to correspondence or visits.

PST head Benedicte Bjornland said earlier that the attack is investigated as a possible act of terrorism. According to special services, the attacker was a 20-year-old man from the Russian region of Bashkortostan, who had travelled to Norway via Sweden. He might face up to 21 years in jail.

The suspect acted alone, PST said. During the interrogation, he admitted to committing a crime and that it was a terror attack.

"I think he is an unstable and distracted 20-year-old man," his lawyer, Ola Lunde, said. "He is a lone wolf and acts by himself. He is not part of a [criminal] network and has no links with the Islamic State terrorist group (banned in Russia - TASS)."

"My client is angry with European because we live too well. He believes that it is a sin to be a Christian and this deserves death," Lunde went on.

According to the lawyer, the young man had plotted other terrorist attacks in Norway and in other European counties, recalling the attacks in France and Germany when terrorists drove trucks into crowds.

 

About the stabbing incident

On January 17, at about 1.00 p.m. the police received an alarm call about an attack on a customer in a Kiwi supermarket in the center of Oslo. A woman was stabbed in the back while standing in line at the till. Then he tried to attack the cashier only to change his mind the next moment and escaped from the crime scene. The police officers detained him nearby the supermarket. The injured woman is in hospital in critical but stable condition, the Norwegian news agency says.

"There is every sign that the woman was a casual victim," the agency quotes an Oslo police spokesman as saying. The investigation of the case was transferred from the police to the PST on Friday.

The press attache of Russia’s embassy in Norway, Timur Chekanov, has said that the Russian embassy has information about the personality of the Russian citizen detained in Oslo.