Stockholm: A truck has ploughed into the upscale Ahlens department store in the Swedish capital of Stockholm on Friday, injuring people, police said.
Swedish radio said that three people have been killed in the crash and Swedish broadcaster SVT says shots have been fired.
“Police received a call from SOS Alarm that a person in a vehicle has injured other people on Drottninggatan,†police wrote on Twitter.
The incident occurred just before 1300 GMT at a corner of the Ahlens department store and the city’s biggest pedestrian street, above-ground from Stockholm’s central subway station.
Helicopters could be heard hovering in the sky over central Stockholm, and a large number of police cars and ambulances were dispatched to the scene, witnesses said.
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven says everything indicates that a truck which has crashed into a major department store in downtown Stockholm is “a terror attack.â€
Lofven says at least two people have been killed in the attack on Friday afternoon on the Ahlens store.
It was not immediately clear whether it was an accident or an attack.
The attack followed a string of assaults in Europe by people using vehicles as weapons.
The deadliest attack came last year in France on the Bastille Day national holiday of July 14, when a man rammed a truck into a crowd in the Mediterranean resort of Nice, killing 86 people.
He was shot dead by police, and the Islamic State group later claimed responsibility.
Last month, Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old convert to Islam known to British security services, drove a car at high speed into pedestrians on London’s Westminster Bridge before launching a frenzied knife attack on a policeman guarding the parliament building.
The incident killed five people, while Masood himself was shot dead by police.
And in December, a man hijacked a truck and slammed into shoppers at a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people.
That attacker was shot dead by police in Milan four days later, and the rampage was claimed by the IS.
In 2014, IS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani called for attacks on citizens of Western countries and gave instructions on how they could be carried out without military equipment, using rocks or knives, or by running people over in vehicles.
There have also been false alerts, however.
Earlier Friday, Belgium dropped terrorism charges against a driver who sped into a crowded shopping area in Antwerp last month, which sparked fears of a copycat terror attack.
However, the driver, a Tunisian man identified as Mohamed R, remains in custody on a weapons offence related to the incident, the federal prosecutor’s office said.