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Russian national arrested in Oslo on terror attack charges withdraws his testimony

The man is suspected of stabbing a woman at a supermarket

MOSCOW, January 22. /TASS/. /TASS/. A Russian national who was detained on Saturday on charges of staging a terror attack in central Oslo, has withdrawn his previous testimony claiming he never planned an attack, his lawyer, Ola Lunde, told TASS on Tuesday.

"He says he did not plan to stage a terror attack when he came to Norway," she said, adding that the man, a 20-year-old native of Russia’s republic of Bashkortostan, planned to spend his vacations in the country.

Meanwhile, Norway’s Police Security Service (PST) said the young man claimed he had committed a terror attack when he stabbed a woman in an Oslo supermarket. Apart from that, he reportedly told about his plans to stage terror attacks in other countries.

Police attorney Anne Karoline Bekken Staff said PST will request a psychiatric examination of the man, who has been placed in a pre-trial detention facility for a term of four weeks without the right to correspondence and visits.

According to the Russian embassy in Norway, the next court hearing on the case will take place on February 15. The Russian national may face 21 years behind bars on terror attacj charges.

At about midday on January 17, 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 to the cash desk. Then he tried to attack the cashier only to change his mind the next moment and fled 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.

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