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On Monday, 33-year-old Sebastian Lamsa, a man with far-right
sympathies, was remanded in custody, suspected of stabbing and
seriously wounding a 12-year-old child of foreign background at
the Valkea shopping centre last Thursday.
Police said a similar attack against a man from a foreign
background followed in the same shopping centre on Tuesday
evening.
"The preliminary information suggests that the motive for the
act would be racist. There is also indication that the act may
have been copied from last week's shopping centre stabbing,"
Oulu police said in a statement.
Finland's leading politicians condemned the attacks, which
Finnish President Alexander Stubb described as "shocking".
"There must be no place for racism or racist violence in Finland
at any level," Stubb wrote in a post.
Lamsa is known as a previously active member of the Nordic
Resistance Movement (NRM), a far-right organisation that Finland
banned in 2020 and the U.S. Department of State designated as a
global terrorist group on Friday.
The second perpetrator, who is suspected of stabbing the adult
victim in his upper body, is a teenager "of above 15 years old",
police said, meaning he is criminally liable under Finnish law.
The shopping centre's security guards intervened in both
attacks. The victims survived and were taken to hospital, police
said.
Lamsa, who chased also another child after stabbing the
12-year-old, is being held in custody for two attempted murders,
Oulu district court documents showed.
He was previously convicted for stabbing a man in 2013 at an
event in a public library where a new book on the far right in
Finland was being presented.
(Reporting by Anne Kauranen and Essi Lehto in Helsinki; Editing
by Sharon Singleton)
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