LONDON – Scottish police said yesterday they had arrested a foreign national under anti-terrorism powers in connection with the botched suicide bombing in Stockholm last December.
Taymour Abdulwahab, a Swedish national of Middle Eastern descent, was killed in an attempted attack on downtown Stockholm after a bomb belt he was wearing went off prematurely.
Swedish officials believe he was preparing to attack a train station or department store at the height of the Christmas shopping season.
Scottish police said a 30-year-old man had been arrested in Glasgow under the Terrorism Act over the incident, following an intelligence-led operation.
“It’s in connection with an incident in Sweden which was in Stockholm, a car bomb incident,” a spokeswoman for Strathclyde Police said.
She said the arrested man was alleged to have been involved in “aiding terrorist activity” outside Scotland. “There’s no kind of evidence to suggest there’s a direct threat to Scotland,” she said.
The police did not give the man’s name or nationality.
“The investigation so far shows there could be a link between the arrested person and the terrorism crime in Stockholm on December 11th, something which further investigation in Scotland will have to make clear,” Swedish security police said in a statement.
In January, the director of Iraq’s anti-terrorism unit said Abdulwahab, who lived in Sweden in the 1990s, had received explosives training in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
He studied at a university in Luton in Britain where he was believed to have become radicalised.
The Stockholm bombing was the latest in a string of attacks dating back to the 1990s by young Islamists educated in Britain, prompting critics to say that London had failed to do enough to tackle extremism. – (Reuters)