Explosion damages U.S. Embassy in Oslo, police say

OSLO, Norway – The Norwegian police said they were investigating an explosion that damaged the U.S. Embassy in Oslo in the early hours of Sunday in what Norwegian officials called a “targeted attack.”

There were no injuries, but “there is significant damage to the entrance area of the embassy,” Inspector Frode Larsen, the head of the Oslo Police Department’s investigation and intelligence unit, said at a news conference Sunday.

The police were searching for at least one individual but had not identified any specific suspects, he said. The police were using dogs, drones and helicopters in their search, he added.

The police received reports of an explosion from residents in the area around 1 a.m. local time, they said. The blast happened at one of the embassy’s entrances, the police said in a statement Sunday.

While the police had no information about the cause of the explosion, Larsen said at the news conference that it would be “natural” to assume that it was linked to the attacks on Iran by the United States because the explosion seemed to be “a targeted attack.”

“We have not,” he added, “locked ourselves into that one explanation.”

If this explosion is related to the war in the Middle East, “this is, above all, a symbolic attack,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a counterterrorism expert at the Swedish Defense University. He added that he did not rule out that the explosion was the work of a local criminal network.

Ranstorp said he was not sure why the embassy in Norway was targeted. “Maybe this is a location where it was possible,” he said.

The police were also cooperating with the U.S. Embassy, said Grete Metlid, a police inspector. She said there was a visible police presence at the embassy on Sunday.

Local residents there were “naturally shaken by what has happened,” she said.

There was also an increased police presence at several locations across the city after the explosion, with stepped-up security for targets that could be linked to Iranian dissidents or Oslo’s Jewish community, Metlid said.

The U.S. Embassy in Oslo declined to comment and referred any questions to the U.S. State Department, which said it was investigating the explosion and thanked Norwegian authorities for their support.

“This is an unacceptable act that we take very seriously,” Espen Barth Eide, the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in a statement. “The security of diplomatic missions is extremely important to us, and the case is now being investigated by the police and the Police Security Service.”

In a statement, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre called it a “very serious and completely unacceptable incident.”

Metlid said there was no reason to believe that there was any threat to the public.

“There is nothing concrete at the moment, nor was there anything concrete during the night, to suggest that this poses a danger to other uninvolved parties,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.