Two people have been stabbed in Finland

But should we call it a terrorist attack without evidence?

Two people have died and six people have been injured after a stabbing attack in a market square in the south-western city of Turku in Finland on Monday 21 August.

Police shot the perpetrator in the thigh before arresting him. The man is one of the 5,657 asylum seekers who arrived in Finland in 2016, he comes from Marocco.

Especially in Finland but also around Europe, the media evoked the possibility of a terrorist attack, and switched readers attention to the surveillance issue without any confirmation from the police or the intelligence services. [TheGuardian][LeMonde][Der Spiegel][Ilta-Sanomat][Kaleva][Eurotopics]

Therefore, the subject of reinforcing Finnish secret services’ surveillance power has been put on the table and debated both among commentators and throughout social media. Even if the choice of fostering those agencies’ power has been broadly accepted in Western Europe, we should remind ourselves that fostering security affects citizens’ privacy and therefore their liberty. Furthermore, it’s not clear rather or not the surveillance enhancements governments have chosen would answer the terrorism issues [Link1][Link2].

As a result, linking Monday’s murders to a terrorist attack or even mentioning one relying only on assumptions could have consequences that we may not consider seriously enough. Above all, global media should take more responsibility when repetedly doing so.

Turku is the former capital city of Finland and is still an important Finnish business center.

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