The Unending Search for Racism
The debate about Rickard Andersson’s killing spree has been informed by an unhealthy discourse about race and immigration in Sweden.
At approximately 11.00 am on 4 February this year, Rickard Andersson turned up at Campus Risbergska, an institution of adult education he had attended between 2013 and 2021, in the Swedish city of Örebro. He was carrying some IKEA bags and a guitar case containing a pump-action shotgun, two semi-automatic rifles, ammunition, and a number of smoke bombs. He changed into military fatigues in one of the school’s bathroom before walking through the hallways opening fire. The police received reports of gunfire at around 12:30, and they arrived on the scene within minutes to find the shooting still in progress. By the time it was all over, Andersson had murdered ten people and wounded six others before apparently shooting himself dead. It was the deadliest mass shooting in Swedish history.
Andersson was a lonely 35-year-old living on his own. His schoolmates remember him as a normal, happy child until about the age of twelve. Then something happened to him. He became withdrawn, solitary, and hardly spoke a word. He finished school without passing a single subject. He tried various jobs but was unable to hold any of them down for more than a couple of weeks. He was born Jonas Simon, but in 2017, he changed his name to Rickard Andersson, adopting one of Sweden’s most common surnames—a bit like someone in England renaming himself John Smith. In other words, he seems to have tried to make himself as anonymous as possible.
Andersson applied for social help, which the council granted so long as he looked for a job, which he wouldn’t do. The council stopped paying his assistance in 2014. After that, according to tax records, he earned nothing, relying instead upon help from his relatives. He seems to have worried about money a lot. In an effort to complete his education, he took classes in mathematics at Risbergska but never passed the exam. There is little trace of him on social media, but he posted two videos in which he read from council documents regarding his financial situation.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, rumour and speculation rushed to fill the information vacuum. A number of right-wing commentators and social-media accounts claimed the shooting had been an Islamist attack and lamented that their warnings about mass migration and Islam had not been heeded. These takes were quietly deleted when the perpetrator’s name and identity were released by the authorities. They were almost instantly replaced by claims from left-wing commentators and social-media accounts that Andersson had been a white supremacist.
Örebro has a large migrant population, and the city’s school for the education of adults naturally enrols a disproportionate number of immigrants. It was therefore not entirely unreasonable to assume that Andersson’s crime had been racially motivated. But more than four weeks later, no evidence has been found to substantiate that assumption. Andersson had advertised and sold a weapons cabinet and two computers online in 2024 and posted a demonstration video on Rumble. He communicated with a Proton mail address to protect his anonymity. His victims included many immigrants, but the shooting seems to have been indiscriminate in that respect.
Enquiries into Andersson’s motive remain maddeningly inconclusive. He seems to have suffered from severe autism and other mental-health afflictions. His murderous spree may have been an act of enraged vengeance directed against the site of his academic failures mixed with the resentment he felt for his perceived mistreatment by the social-security authorities. If we can learn anything from this crime, it is probably that social services need to become much better at identifying and helping the kind of lonely and unstable men usually responsible for mass shootings.
But the allegations of racism didn’t end after the police presented all the evidence they had been able to find. The racial motive is too powerfully appealing to the radical Right and the progressive Left, albeit in antithetical ways. An anonymous racist account on X hailed Andersson as a “hero,” while a far-right website included anonymous comments like these: “It is probably just some Muslims killed, so no damage was done”; “We need a thousand men like that”; “Finally someone who is doing some cleaning.” At the other end of the political spectrum, progressives were also happy to take Andersson’s racism for granted, but many of these voices belonged to established journalists not nameless forum trolls.
Karin Pettersson, the cultural editor of Sweden’s most popular tabloid Aftonbladet, has found a new way of proving what she wanted to believe. Even if we are unable to ascertain Andersson’s precise motives, she said, the fact that he chose to shoot up a campus mostly populated by “people with black hair, with a so-called foreign background” was evidence of an ideological crime. In a Facebook post, Tobias Hubinette, a commentator and a researcher of racism, declared that Andersson’s race, age, and sex made him typical of Swedes who support Sweden’s right-wing political party the Sweden Democrats. In other words, his politics were presumptively far-right because he was a white man in his thirties. Even after the police announced that they had been unable to find evidence of a racial motive, Swedish television has continued to interview immigrants in Örebro about their fear of more attacks.
Mustafa Panshiri
The day after the shooting, a racial explanation of Andersson’s atrocity seemed to receive support from a report by Swedish television channel TV4. The station obtained an audio recording from a student who had locked himself into a school bathroom during the shooting, and its reporters determined that Andersson could be heard screaming “You should leave Europe!” amid the pandemonium. The news duly rocketed across social media, and many commentators eagerly declared that a racial motive had now been established. News organisations in other countries repeated the claim.
But when the unedited recording was released, it transpired that the unidentified voice was not screaming during the shooting, but later. Interpretation of the recording was further complicated by the revelation that a female teacher who had been in the vicinity of the bathroom said she had yelled at her students to leave. The word that sounds like “Europe” might in fact have been the word “everyone,” since the two words sound almost identical in Swedish: Europa/allihopa. On the other hand, the screaming voice on the recording does sound like it belongs to a man, and possibly to a policeman who can be heard later. TV4 sent the recording to two audio experts for analysis, both of whom concluded that the voice was yelling “You should leave Europe!” But ten other audio experts published an article on the website Kvartal, in which they argued that the sound is so unclear that it is impossible to be certain of either the speaker’s sex or the words spoken. TV4’s report, they added, was simply “frivolous and irresponsible clickbait journalism.”
People naturally want a clear and unambiguous explanation for heinous acts of violence, and they refuse to be satisfied by a lingering question mark. But the debate about Andersson’s killing spree has also been informed by the increasingly unhealthy discourse about race and immigration in Sweden. This dimension is evident in the objections made by some commentators to the language used to describe the attack by law enforcement and media. Less than 24 hours after the shooting, Jonas Wikström, a former MP for the socialist party Vänsterpartiet, tweeted:
To dismiss an ideological motive while investigation of the motive is ongoing may sound strange, until one realises that it simply means the perpetrator was not Muslim. The police made exactly the same kind of statements after the Visby attack in 2022.
Others argued that if the killer had been a Muslim, he would have been described as a terrorist. On the evening of the attack, the editor-in-chief of the Blankspot website, wondered why the police were already so certain that there was no “terror connection.” That same night, journalist Alexandra Pascalidou tweeted:
Why is the perpetrator called a “school shooter” and not a terrorist or mass murderer? We already know the man’s ethnicity. If he had been an immigrant, his terror crime would already have been culturalised and collectivised. The perpetrator went from hatred to action.
Is this asymmetrical language evidence of some kind of double standard? A man who murders ten innocent people during a killing spree is obviously terrorising his victims, but the term “terrorist” usually indicates an ideological motive and an attempt to further some kind of political goal. There is still no evidence that either description applies to Andersson.
Thirty bombs detonated in Sweden during January alone, and there were a further 27 blasts in December 2024. This was in addition to multiple shootings. In an interview on 1 February, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson admitted that the government and police had lost control, and that the unprecedented spike in violent crime was obviously related to unsustainable levels of immigration in recent decades. This statement has been misunderstood and misrepresented by progressive media and commentators, who have conflated criticism of immigration policy with an attempt to stigmatise immigrants.
But any society that attempts to absorb a huge influx of newcomers in a short period of time will experience similar problems. Those responsible for this failed policy are simply refusing to acknowledge the obvious. They prefer to cleave to a narrative in which wicked white men kill foreigners and anyone who criticises immigration policy can be credibly accused of inciting lethal racist violence. This is simply an intellectually lazy way of avoiding the problems at hand. If we want to better understand the respective problems associated with migration and alienation, reporters and politicians must resist the temptation to exploit atrocities for political gain and refocus on the available facts.
