LONDON: British police were searching a house in southern England as part of an investigation into bombings in a busy shopping district of the Swedish capital on Saturday.
Police said on Monday they had begun examining a terraced house in the town of Luton, Bedfordshire, on Sunday night under the terrorism act.
“No arrests have been made and no hazardous materials found,” police said in a statement. The property has been cordoned off. Britain’s interior ministry said it was in close contact with Swedish authorities but that it would be inappropriate to comment further.
Swedish police said they were treating the bomb blasts in Stockholm as an act of terrorism by a lone attacker that followed an emailed threat referring to Sweden’s troops in Afghanistan and to cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.
US-based SITE intelligence group, which monitors Islamist websites, said a member of Shumukh al-Islam posted a message on Sunday identifying the alleged bomber as Taymour Abdulwahab and cited media reports naming him as Taymour Abdulwahab Al-Abdaly.
Another post on a Muslim dating website showed Abdaly was married with two young daughters and looking for a second wife. In the post he wrote that he was born in Baghdad and moved to Sweden in 1992 and that he studied at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton, a town with a large Muslim community. Media reports said he graduated in 2004. The university could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Daily Telegraph newspaper quoted neighbours as saying they last saw him two-and-a-half weeks ago.
“I used to see him around often. He didn’t say much but seemed nice. I used to see him walking with his kids,” Tahir Hussain, 33, a taxi driver who lives nearby, told the paper.
Bomber almost certainly Iraqi-born Swede: The man who died setting off two blasts in Stockholm on Saturday was almost certainly an Iraqi-born man who moved to Sweden in 1992, widely identified in reports as Taymour Abdulwahab, an official said on Monday.
Chief Prosecutor Tomas Lindstrand also told a news conference that the man had been carrying a bomb belt and had probably intended to set off his charges in the crowd at the main railway station or a city-centre department store. “He is 98 percent identified,” Lindstrand told a news conference. Asked if the man was Abdulwahab, he said: “yes”.
