Police secure the area after a shooting in Oslo on June 25, 2022. - Two people were killed and several others seriously wounded in a shooting in central Oslo, Norwegian police said on June 25. (Photo by Javad PARSA / NTB / AFP) / Norway OUT

Two people were killed in a gunshot outside a club popular in the queer scene in the Norwegian capital Oslo. 21 other people were injured, several of them seriously. Shortly after the incident, a person was arrested near the crime scene, the police tweeted early Saturday morning.

“The police are treating the case as an act of terrorism,” the authorities said on Saturday. A suspect was arrested after shots were fired around 1am in three places, including in front of a gay bar. This is already known to the police, reported the broadcaster NRK. Operations manager Tore Barstad said that everything indicated that it was a lone perpetrator.

The 40th Pride Parade was to take place in Oslo on Saturday. The organizers canceled this on Saturday morning.

According to media reports, the shots were fired in the center of Oslo near the gay club “London Pub”, a jazz club and a snack bar. The police did not provide information on the age or the identity of the arrested person.

The arrested person has not yet commented. The police searched his home, NRK reported. Firearms were used in the attack, two of which were seized, NRK quoted Barstad as saying.

A reporter who was an eyewitness said he saw a man with a bag approach the scene, took a gun and started shooting. There was a panic in the nightclub, the station quoted another eyewitness as saying.

The Aftenposten newspaper reported that civilians helped arrest the suspect. “He seemed very sure of what he was aiming at,” an eyewitness told the Verdens Gang newspaper about the perpetrator. Another witness told the newspaper that the man had fired an automatic weapon and that the crime scene looked “like a war zone”. Several people with head injuries were lying on the ground.

Just eight months ago, a killing spree shook the Scandinavian country. A 38-year-old Dane attacked passers-by with bows and arrows and knives in the southeastern Norwegian city of Kongsberg last October, killing five of them, including a 52-year-old German woman.

At trial he pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder. According to experts, the 38-year-old has suffered from paranoid schizophrenia since 2007. A court on Friday ordered the assassin to be held in a psychiatric institution for life.

The worst violent crime to date in Norway’s post-war period occurred on July 22, 2011. Anders Behring Breivik, now 42 years old and now calling himself Fjotolf Hansen, detonated a car bomb in Oslo’s government district on July 22, 2011, killing eight people .