Uzbekistan on Friday said it had warned officials in the “West” about the Stockholm attack accused’s links to the the Islamic State group, AFP said, quoting a report by Russian news agency RIA Novosti. The report quoted Uzbek Foreign Minister, Abdulaziz Kamilov, who said information about Rakhmat Akilov had been “passed to one of our Western partners, so that the Swedish side could be informed”. No details about the Western country were disclosed.
“During his stay abroad, he was recruited through the internet by emissaries of the international terrorist organisation Islamic State,” Kamilov was quoted as saying. The accused reportedly “urged his compatriots to travel to Syria” to fight for the extremist group and used online messaging services. Swedish security service, however, refrained from confirming or denying the reports, BBC reported.
The 39-year-old accused had left Uzbekistan for Sweden in 2014 and applied for residency there. He was put on a wanted list in February 2017 after he went missing and was facing expulsion orders since December 2016. On April 11, Akilov’s lawyer said “His [Akilov’s] position is that he admits to a terrorist crime and accepts therefore that he will be detained.”
The police told Reuters that the construction worker had hijacked a beer truck and driven it into pedestrians on a busy street in Sweden’s Stockholm, before driving into a department store on April 7. Of the four dead, two were Swedish, one was a Briton and the other a Belgian.
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