Sweden's third largest city Malmoe is still on high alert following 19 unresolved shootings which police believe are the work of a lone gunman targeting people of immigrant origin.
Panic has spread in the southern Swedish city since police announced they believe a lone shooter with racist motives is behind the sniper attacks, which have killed on person.
The police are also investigating other unresolved crimes and believe the gunman may have committed unsolved murders dating as far back as 2003, AFP reports.
Swedish police have set up a task force of up to 50 police officers to look into the unsolved shootings in Malmoe over the past year, which are believed to be racially motivated.
Parallels between crimes
The crimes bear a chilling similarity to the case of an immigrant-shooting sniper in Stockholm in the early 1990s.
Police were cautious in drawing parallels between the two cases, but the Swedish press quickly picked up on the similarities, with the country's two largest tabloids saying that police were searching for "a new laserman."
"Laserman" was the nickname given to John Ausonius, who shot 11 people of immigrant origin, killing one, in and around Stockholm from August 1991 to January 1992.
Daily Dagens Nyheter reports that the profiler who helped solve that case had joined the investigation team in Malmoe.
Last week two women, aged 26 and 34, were slightly injured when someone shot them through a kitchen window. A teenager driving a moped was also shot at in broad daylight earlier in the day, but was not hit.
In both cases, the victims were of immigrant origin, police said.
Police still worried after lull
Boerje Sjoestroem of the Malmoe police told daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that even though there haven't been any shootings in the last couple of days, it doesn't mean that the shooter will stop the attacks.
"It's impossible to know how this gunman is reasoning, and whether the recent attention has prompted him to lay low or if it will trigger more attacks," said Boerje Sjoestrem to Svenska Dagbladet.
In many of the unsolved shootings over the past year, the victims had not adopted risky behavior and were simply going about their daily business, he said.
"Many of those who were affected were in completely normal situations. It is not risky behaviour to work out at the gym or to wait for the bus," Sjoestroem said, insisting that "the worst thing people can do is to lock themselves in and capitulate."
Just as with the "Laserman" case, the recent shootings in Malmoe come at a time when an openly anti-immigration party has just entered the Swedish parliament.
This year, the far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats won 20 seats in parliament in the September 19 election, with an especially strong showing in the south of Sweden.
Gellert Tamas, who wrote a book about the Laserman in 2002, said the current political situation could be an inspiration for today's shooter, much like the anti-immigration New Democracy party inspired Ausonius.
"John Ausonius was very clear in the interviews I did with him that he was inspired by the debate on immigration that took place in the early 1990s," he told Dagens Nyheter.
"He felt moral support, that people were behind him. But he also felt political support, from New Democracy above all, but also from other xenophobic parties such as the Sweden Democrats," which had just been created.
Of the Malmoe shootings being probed, only one has resulted in a death: a 20-year-old woman of Swedish origin who was shot last October while sitting in a car with a young man of immigrant background. He was seriously injured in the attack, AFP reports.
