An eighteen-year-old former pupil walked into the Brinell secondary school in Fagersta, northwest of Stockholm, carrying a sword and wearing a helmet. One person was killed. Two teenage girls were seriously injured, and a third person was taken to hospital with injuries of unknown severity.

Police received the call at 14:06. "We got the call at 14:06 and sent every available unit to the school," a police spokesperson said. The attacker was shot by police and is in custody.

According to Swedish public television, citing unnamed sources, the man arrested was a former pupil at the same school and already had a previous conviction for assault. Which means the system had him in its records. It had him, it knew him, and he still walked through the door of a school with 450 pupils aged between sixteen and twenty.

One year after Orebro

This happens exactly one year after the school shooting in Orebro, in central Sweden, where the attacker killed ten people before killing himself. That was the deadliest mass attack in Swedish history.

"A serious incident occurred in Fagersta right at the start of the new school year. We still do not know what motivated this act, but we know the police are working intensively on the case," said Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.

The wording is standard. We hear it every time, in every country, after every day like this. What we rarely hear is what specifically changed since the last time.

The country that counted as the safest

For decades Sweden was the model of safety and social stability - the country others pointed to when they wanted to show how it is done. Today, in that country, schools and public buildings in one town were closed and evacuated because of a single attack with a sword.

Did the model give way, or did we simply stop looking at what happens beneath the surface? The Nordic image of order and calm is something the Balkans are often sold as the goal to aim for. It is worth asking which version of that image we are actually heading towards.