The twenty-one-year-old killer was a native Swede named Anton Lundin Pettersson, and according to witnesses he arrived at the school in a black trench coat, a face mask, and a black helmet and stabbed his victims with a large knife. After attacking an Iraqi-born teacher’s aide, at the school entrance, he appeared to have deliberately avoided fair-skinned students. Instead, he marched on until he found and killed a Somali-born fifteen-year-old and severely injured a recently arrived Syrian teenager, according to Swedish police. Shortly after, police gunned down the attacker, who died at a local hospital. He left behind a letter stating his reasons for the attack, police said, which makes clear that it was a racially motivated hate crime.

The article gives a summary of the current political climate in Sweden.

More than a dozen asylum centers have been set on fire in recent months, and the Sweden Democrats, a populist anti-immigrant party, have been rapidly gaining popularity, according to recent polls.

The attacks started spreading the last couple of weeks after the Sweden Democrats published lists of planned asylum centers.