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STOCKHOLM SUICIDE BOMBING

TAIMOUR ABDULWAHAB

No sign Stockholm bomber had help: Säpo

Sweden's intelligence agency announced on Thursday that there are no indications that the man behind Sweden's first suicide bombing had any accomplices.

No sign Stockholm bomber had help: Säpo

The Swedish Security Service (Säkerhetspolisen, Säpo) summed up its probe on Thursday, two months after the attack.

“There is nothing for the time being indicating he had accomplices,” Säpo spokeswoman Sirpa Franzén told AFP, adding that the agency was still “not ruling out the possibility.”

During the 60 days since Taimour Abdulwahab, a 29-year-old sports therapist, blew up his car and then himself near a busy Stockholm shopping street on December 11th, Säpo said it had received nearly 1,000 tips from the public, conducted around 700 interrogations and examined several hundred items.

The agency had never officially identified Abdulwahab as the bomber, who was the only one to die in the twin blasts, but on Thursday, Franzén confirmed his identity.

“We have determined who he was. It is who everyone is saying it is,” she said.

Abdulwahab, a Swedish citizen who lived in the British town of Luton with his wife and three children, narrowly missed wreaking carnage among Christmas shoppers when he blew himself up next to Stockholm’s busiest pedestrian street a day before his 29th birthday.

He was carrying a cocktail of explosives and is believed to have mistakenly set off a small explosion that killed him before he could carry out what appears to have been a mission to kill “as many people as possible,” a Swedish prosecutor said days after the attack.

An Islamist website, Shumukh al-Islam, posted a purported will by Abdulwahab which said he was fulfilling a threat by Al-Qaeda in Iraq to attack Sweden.

Shortly before the explosions, Säpo and the TT news agency received an email with audio files in which Abdulwahab is heard telling “all hidden mujahedeen in Europe, and especially in Sweden, it is now the time to fight back.”

Säpo would not comment on media reports claiming a second person can be heard breathing in the background on the files, indicating Abdulwahab had help organising the attack.

CSN

Suicide bomber lived off Swedish student aid

Stockholm suicide bomber Taimour Abdulwahab received more money from the Swedish state than from his terrorist financiers, including a 54,000-kronor ($8,550) payout made after he bled to death in his failed terror bid.

Suicide bomber lived off Swedish student aid

All told, Abdulwahab received nearly 750,000 kronor ($119,000) from the Swedish National Board for Student Aid (Centrala studiestödsnämnden, CSN), the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper reports.

The figure is more than ten times the estimated $8,000 sum cited in a Scottish court’s conviction last year of Nesserdine Menni, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for funding Abdulwahab’s December 2010 attack in Stockholm.

The revelations come from Swedish author Mats Ekman, the author of a book on Iraqi intelligence activities in Sweden during Saddam Hussein’s rule of Iraq.

Ekman examined all of Abdulwahab’s student aid applications and payments, and discovered the Stockholm suicide bomber frequently sent certificates to CSN verifying his coursework.

“I would like to thank CSN and wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” Abdulwahab wrote at the end of one of his letters to the agency.

According to Ekman’s research, Abdulwahab first applied for student aid in the late 1990s and used the money he received from the Swedish agency to fund his studies in Luton, England, the place where the Iraqi-born Swede is believed to have became inspired by militant Islamism.

It remains unclear what happened to the 54,000 kronor sent by CSN to Abdulwahab two days after he died in the December 2012 suicide bomb attack in a busy shopping district in central Stockholm.

After Abdulwahab’s death, CSN subsequently wrote off 670,000 kronor of his student loan debt.

Prosecutor Agnetha Hilding Qvarnström continues to investigate the suicide bomb attack but refused to speculate on how much money Abdulwahab may have spent or whether Swedish student aid money may have been used to buy materials used in the bomb attack.

Hilding Qvarnström is expected to present her investigation some time in the spring.

The revelations may also lead to changes in how CSN deals with outstanding debts when someone dies with outstanding dues.

“This has been a real eye-opener for us,” CSN spokesman Klas Elfving told DN, adding that the payment was authorized on December 9th, prior to Abdulwahab’s death.

The Local/dl

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