At about 04:45 local time, an explosion and subsequent fire took place at an apartment block in Gothenburg, Sweden, resulting in the evacuation of about 100 residents and the injuries of over a dozen people. According to Swedish police, 16 people were taken to hospitals, of which 4 were seriously injured. As of now, the cause of the explosion is still under investigation, though Interior Minister Mikael Damberg told news outlets that "it's obvious that a crime cannot be excluded" while police spokesman Thomas Fuxborg said that initial investigations suggest that the explosion is "not of natural causes" and that a device was "probably" deliberately placed at the site of the blast.

So far, local media outlets say that since the fire department on scene reported that the building has no gas, a gas leak has been ruled out for now. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said that right now, it is too early to say exactly what happened in the apartment block and that he did not want to speculate on what happened without more evidence, but if "criminals" were behind the explosion, "society is always stronger than crime".

In recent years, Sweden reported a surge in gang-related crimes, recording 107 detonations and 102 attempted or prepared detonations nationwide in 2020. The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention said that the nation had gone from having one of the lowest levels of fatal shootings in Europe to one of the highest.

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