Someone threw gasoline-filled bottles Thursday at a polling station in a Stockholm suburb where Iraqi expatriates were voting in parliamentary elections. The bottles did not catch fire. Police said one man had been seen throwing them against a window but he was bravely able to escape before security guards could arrest him.  A group claiming to be a Swedish branch of al-Qaida sent a letter to several media organizations in the country claiming responsibility but experts said they doubted the claim.
| It does sound pretty weak, doesn't it? |
Police issued an alert to other Iraqi polling stations but no further attacks were reported. Sweden has not been the target of a major terrorist attack for decades and security police said they were investigating whether a Swedish al-Qaida branch even existed. "Anyone can use the name al-Qaida, it is a marketable name," Magnus Norell, a terrorism expert at the Swedish Defense Research Institute, told television station TV4. "But I am doubtful that there are any developed cells here in Sweden." Sweden, with a large immigrant population, has more than 70,000 people of Iraqi descent, of whom 40,000 are Iraqi citizens. They voted in the capital, Stockholm, and Goteborg in the southwest. |