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OSLO, Norway — Two people were killed and at least 14 injured early Saturday morning in downtown Oslo when a gunman opened fire outside two nightclubs and a diner, a police official said.
A male suspect was apprehended five minutes after the shooting was reported, the Oslo police said on Twitter. Tore Barstad, a police operations chief who spoke to reporters about the incident, did not identify the suspect or speculate about a motive.
One of the two nightclubs, the London Pub, is a center of gay nightlife in Oslo. The city’s annual Pride parade is set to take place Saturday, and it normally marks a festive start to summer.
Olav Rønneberg, a crime reporter for the Norwegian public broadcaster, NRK, happened to be in the area when the violence began. “I saw a man arrive at the scene with a bag, he took up a gun and started shooting,” he told the outlet.
Shootings are exceedingly rare in Norway, a country of five million people whose capital lies beside a picturesque fjord.
Gun owners must be licensed and take safety classes, and a ban on semiautomatic weapons enacted by the Norwegian Parliament — a response to a 2011 attack by a far-right gunman that killed 77 people — took effect last year.
The 2011 attack started when the gunman, Anders Behring Breivik, detonated a fertilizer bomb in downtown Oslo, killing eight people. He then killed 69 people, mostly teenagers, in a shooting rampage at a political summer camp.
Mr. Breivik received a 21-year sentence for the attacks, the maximum under Norwegian law. He was denied parole in February by a Norwegian court that said he “appeared devoid of empathy and compassion for the victims of the terror.”
For the last decade, the country has been reckoning with the trauma of the massacre. People who live near the island where it occurred have disagreed over the construction of a permanent public memorial at a nearby harbor. The families of the victims support it, but some residents have said the memorial risks turning the area into a destination for tragedy tourism.
Mike Ives contributed reporting from Seoul.
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