Liege: Lone Shooters Bane Of Society
- December 26th, 2011
- Posted by EUEditor
Another social outsider able to keep guns: the attacker who fired on shoppers in Liege on 13.12.11Â took six lives with some 100 others hurt.
CRUEL ATTACK
The gunman, a Belgian called Nordine Amrani (picture), 33, got to a high point on St Lambert Square and shot into crowds of market-goers there, with an automatic rifle, also tossing three grenades, before killing himself.
He had been to prison on charges related to guns and the drug trade, and police said they’d had him scheduled for a desk interview on the day of the murders.
He’d gone to the square after shooting dead a woman, 45, in another part of the city.
It was seen as an extreme criminal act, not linked to terrorism.
Killed in the Square attack were an elderly women, a toddler, two teenagers and a man aged 20, the last dying from his wounds after ten days.
BITTER TOLL – TOO MANY CASES
Bitter in any review of the year now ending is the recollection of the massacre perpetrated in Norway on 22.7.11.
Anders Breivik, Norwegian, then 32 (picture), detonated a bomb in the centre of Oslo, killing eight, then made his attack on a Labour Party youth camp outside the city, on Utoeya Island, killing 69, mostly young people.
He’d been interested in weapons and was attracted to extreme right-wing politics.
In neighbouring Finland, anxiety over such attacks had already prompted a tightening of gun control laws.
On New Year’s Eve 2009, Ibrahim Shkupolui, 43, a former Kosovo Albanian and long-term resident of the town of Espoo, shot dead five people and then himself, because of what was believed to have been domestic trouble.
The country had seen two similar cases of multiple shootings, in 2007 and 2008.
Last April a Dutchman, Tristan van den Rijn, 24, known to police as a gun fancier, killed six people, injuring ten others at Alphen aan den Rijn (9.4.11); and at Winnenden in Germany, in March 2009, a 17 year-old started a shooting rampage at a school, eventually killing 15 people.
At Port Arthur, Tasmania, a gunman aged 28 shot dead 35 people and wounded 21 before he was captured by police.
The crime prompted a national amnesty and buy-back of automatic weapons, and new restrictions on access to firearms.
See EUAustralia: “Enemy within: national tragedy in Norwayâ€, 23.7.11; “Netherlands shootingâ€, 11.4.11.
Reference
Flanders News, Brussels, “ Sixth victim dies after Liège massacreâ€, 23.12.11.http://www.deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws.english/news/111223_liege_new_victim,(26.12.11).
Pictures   virtualtourist, Wikipedia