Naser Yazdanpanah runs a hairdressing and tailoring service in Malmo. Last weekend he was ironing a pair of trousers when he heard what he thought were rocks being thrown at his shop window. It turned out to be gunshots.
“I jumped out and grabbed this guy and shouted for help, but he head-butted me in the teeth and ran away,” he said.
As an Iranian living in Malmo, Yazdanpanah knows all about the gunman stalking immigrants in the city, whom police have blamed for a series of 15 shootings in the past year. He thought the attacker might have chosen him for a reason, since earlier in the day he had taken part in a protest against the shootings.
Detectives have not linked his case to the others, but Yazdanpanah said the community is anxious.
“You can’t describe what it feels like to be working in your shop one moment and then finding yourself being shot at the next,” said Yazdanpanah, 58, who has lived in Malmo for 12 years. “I’m not shocked, I’m not scarred. I’m trying to fight this and get on with it. It’s very sad what is happening [with the shootings], but we are dealing with a sick person.”
He went to hospital, but opened the shop again later the same day.
“I don’t want people to get upset that they are not getting their clothes done, just because I’m sitting here talking,” he said, pointing to the clothes piling up on the table next to his sewing machine.
After the incident, the press descended on his shop, with flowers and greetings pouring in from his customers.
“Look at this place, it’s turned into a flower shop,” he said.
Two weeks ago, a 28-year-old man was shot in the back waiting at a bus stop in nearby Nydala. Standing near the stop on Sunday, Viraz Faik said everyone was worried about their security.
“It’s very uncomfortable for us as immigrants to know that there is somebody out there who is after us. You can’t stop thinking about it,” she said.
Faik, who is from Iraq, is getting married soon and is planning to move to Austria with her husband. She is worried about guests’ safety at her wedding.
“I have got people from my school attending the wedding here in Nydala, so I’m nervous,” said Faik, 23, who has lived in the area for 10 years.
The attacks on the estate in the Fosie district have drawn the attention of the Swedish press, and Social Democrats leader Mona Sahlin, who visited in the wake of the shooting.
In the past few weeks, police have intensified their presence on the streets of Malmo, drafting in an extra 50 officers from neighboring districts, but there has been no breakthrough in the hunt for the gunman. Inside the greengrocer’s in Nydala’s central park area, the owner, Hussein Muhammad, says he has noticed a difference in people’s attitude since the shootings.
“At 6pm it gets really quiet around here. It wasn’t like that before. Before the shootings people were hanging around here all night, but now it gets completely quiet. I stay open as usual, but it’s affected the business,” he said.
He lives about 2km away, in the central area of Mollevangen, but says he is not worried about traveling home at night.
“What’s going to happen is going to happen, no matter what you do. Of course you have to be careful, but the [gunman] is coming up behind people, so what can you do?” he said. “You are concerned because you had never thought this was going to happen in Sweden.”
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS