Orebro attack: Mass shooting survivor describes moment he escaped classroom

“I was in the classroom and someone suddenly came in. I saw him, I saw the shooter. As soon as he entered, he’d started shooting. Six, five times. So I started running.”

We’re speaking with a man who survived when Rickard Andersson opened fire, killing 11 people, at an adult education centre in Sweden’s worst mass shooting.

“I fell over and he started shooting towards me and I dropped my phone as I ran off and managed to escape,” the witness says.

As he shares the visceral detail of his account, he becomes emotional as he describes losing friends before his eyes.

“It was very scary,” says the man, who asked not to be named.

“I saw him shoot others. So I’m having a really, really tough time right now. I haven’t been able to sleep.”

Orebro shooting: What we know about the attacker

He came back to the scene of the attack on Wednesday – where he used to go to lessons each day – and felt unable to comprehend how a place of safety became a place of terror in a matter of minutes.

The adult education centre in Orebro sits between two schools and many gathered at the police cordon the morning after the attack.

We watched as children lit candles with their parents before starting their day. At the cordon clutching his brown briefcase we meet Marcus Ahltun.

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He’s the headteacher at one of the schools and had been in his office when he heard the gunshots next door and made the rapid decision to lockdown the school.

“I heard screams, and then I heard shots fired. I immediately decided that we needed to shelter in the school,” he told us.

Being metres away from the atrocity he said was “a surreal, numb feeling”.

Numb is how many have felt at the site today. Some came alone to pay their respects, some gathered in groups. We watched friends clutch and hold each other tightly.

Orebro is a university city and a young place with diverse communities.

People in the city and throughout the country are both mourning the loss of the victims and asking themselves how a gunman was able to enter an educational facility and kill.