FINLAND: Police investigating Finland's worst peacetime bomb attack have found material for making bombs at the home of the only suspect, a chemistry student who was among the seven killed by the blast, investigators said yesterday.
The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) said the motive for the devastating explosion at a busy shopping centre on Friday evening, which injured some 80 people and shocked this peaceful Nordic nation, remained a mystery. "He was likely a skilled bomb- maker," the NBI's deputy chief, Mr Jari Liukku, said. He said the explosives used were unusual and different from those used by the military.
Finnish media said the dead student may have obtained bomb-making information on the Internet, and said his parents, unaware of his activities and deeply shocked, were receiving counselling.
Police said the death toll would have been much higher if the bomb had exploded a few minutes earlier, as a performance for children nearby had ended shortly before the blast.
The shopping mall, the country's second-biggest, in the Helsinki suburb of Vantaa, was packed with more than 2,000 people.
The suspect was "an ordinary young man from a middle-class family. There was nothing particular about him or his personality," Mr Liukku said.
Police declined to name the suspect as the investigation was still under way, and Mr Liukku said Finnish law prevented police from commenting in detail on a suspect's mental state. Police searched the home of the student, who lived with his parents, and found material there that could be used to make a bomb. "In the home search, material was found which can connect the perpetrator's residence and the site of the incident," the NBI chief, Mr Tero Haapala, said.
Authorities said the youth, a student at a technology institute in Vantaa, had no criminal record. - (Reuters)