Finnish police have arrested five people in the city of Turku as part of their investigation into a knife attack that left two people dead.
Security forces shot and wounded the knife-wielding suspect on Friday, arresting him minutes after a stabbing spree at a Turku market square.
“There was a raid and we have now six suspects in custody, the main suspect and five others,” Markus Laine, a police superintendent, told the AFP news agency on Saturday.
Officials on Saturday raised the number of injured in the attack from six to eight.
“We are investigating the role of these five other people but we are not sure yet if they had anything to do with (the attack)… We will interrogate them, after that we can tell you more. But they had been in contact with the main suspect,” Laine said.
Police have not confirmed the identity of the suspect, but Laine said investigators were “pretty sure” they knew who he was.
They have only described him as “a young man of foreign origin”, providing no other details except to say they were collaborating with the Finnish Immigration Service.
The suspect is being treated in hospital in intensive care for a gunshot wound to the thigh.
The motive for the attack was not yet known.
“We haven’t yet interrogated the main suspect because of his medical condition,” Laine said.
Officials said it was likely the suspect acted alone, but added they were looking for “other possible perpetrators”.
Finland raised its emergency readiness across the country after the stabbing, increasing security at airports and train stations and putting more officers on the streets.
In June, Finland’s intelligence and security agency Supo raised the country’s terror threat level by a notch, from low to elevated, the second notch on a four-tier scale.
It said at the time that it saw an increased risk of an attack by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.
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