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Swedish officials are investigating whether Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly was helped in Saturday's attack
The suicide bomber who blew himself up on a street in Stockholm may have had help preparing the attack, Swedish officials said today.
Investigators initially said that Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, an Iraqi-born Swede, appeared to have acted alone during Saturday's bombing, in which he died and two people were hurt.
But they are also "investigating whether there could have been someone else involved in the preparations", though there are no suspects at this point. The Swedish investigators said they were aware of claims made by Iraqi officials that captured insurgents had revealed the suicide bombing was part of attacks being planned by al-Qaida against the US and Europe during the Christmas season.
"We consider it interesting," said Jan Garton, of the SAPO security service. He wouldn't say whether Sweden was in touch with Iraq about the case.
Abdaly spent much of the past decade in Britain and appears to have been radicalised there. SAPO have said he was not among roughly 200 Islamists they had identified in Sweden.
An audio file sent shortly before the blast from his mobile phone referred to Sweden's military presence in Afghanistan and an image by a Swedish artist that depicted the prophet Muhammad as a dog and enraged many Muslims.
They said they had performed an autopsy on Abdaly and analysed the explosives he used, but were not ready to release the results yet. They believe the explosives went off by mistake and that Abdaly may have planned to detonate them in a busier place, such as a shopping centre or railway station.
One theory is that Abdaly had problems with his explosives, and walked off the busy pedestrian street to a side street, "and that's when something happened", Anders Thornberg of SAPO said.
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