STOCKHOLM // At least two people were killed after a van drove into a crowd of people outside a busy department store in central Stockholm on Friday in what the Swedish prime minister said was a terror attack.
Prime minister Stefan Lofven said at least two people have been killed in the attack on the Ahlens store.
The broadcaster SVT put the number of dead at five, but police said they could not immediately confirm that.
"Police received a call from SOS alarm that a person in a vehicle has injured other people on Drottninggatan," police wrote on Twitter.
The attack occurred just before 1300 GMT at the corner of the Ahlens store and Drottninggatan, the city's biggest pedestrian street, above Stockholm's central subway station.
Thick smoke was rising from the site, while video images showed an area blocked off by police and crowds gathering around the police cordon.
The incident follows a series of attacks in Europe by people using vehicles as weapons.
The worst attack was on July 14 last year in France as the country celebrated the Bastille Day holiday, in which a man rammed a lorry into a crowd in the Mediterranean resort of Nice, killing 86 people.
He was shot dead by police, and the extremist group ISIL claimed responsibility.
Last month, Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old convert to Islam who was known to British security services, drove a car at high speed into pedestrians on London's Westminster Bridge before fatally stabbing a policeman guarding the houses of parliament.
A Romanian woman who fell off the bridge was taken off life support on Thursday, taking the death toll from the attack to five, while Masood himself was shot dead at the scene by police.
And in December, a man hijacked a lorry and slammed into shoppers at a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people.
That attacker was shot dead by police in Milan four days later, and the rampage was claimed by the ISIL.
In 2014, ISIL spokesman Abu Mohammed Al Adnani called for attacks on citizens of western countries and gave instructions on how they could be carried out without military equipment, using rocks or knives, or by running people over in vehicles.
There have also been false alerts, however.
Earlier on Friday, Belgium dropped terrorism charges against a driver who sped into a crowded shopping area in Antwerp last month, which sparked fears of a copy-cat terror attack.
However, the driver, a Tunisian man identified as Mohamed R, remained in custody on a weapons offence related to the incident, the federal prosecutor's office said.
* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
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