MOSCOW, January 18. /TASS/. A Russian citizen has been detained in Norway for stabbing a woman in Oslo on Thursday. The chief of the Norwegian security service PST, Benedicte Bjornland, told the NRK television channel the incident was considered as a possible terrorist attack.
"The man is a Russian citizen who arrived in Norway on Thursday through Sweden," Bjornland said, adding that the suspect had agreed to cooperate with the authorities.
"Further investigation is expected to find out if the incident was a terrorist attack," she said. According to the special services, the 20-year-old Bashkortostan-born man had already been questioned by the Oslo police.
The law enforcers say the suspect was acting entirely on his own. Bjornland said he was unprepared to make any conclusions for the time being whether the Russian citizen had any connections with some terrorist group. When questioned the man agreed to confess and described the incident as a terrorist attack.
"He said his intention was to commit a terrorist attack by killing several people," Bjornland said.
At about 13:00 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 standing in line to the cashier was stabbed by a male attacker. After that he tried to attack the cashier only to change his mind the next moment and escape from the crime scene. The stabbed 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.