Bio

Ibrahim Shkupolli was born in 1966 in Mitrovica, in what was then Yugoslavia. He was an ethnic Albanian from the Kosovo region.

He entered Finland in 1990, traveling through Norway. He lived in Finland for many years and was residing there without legal immigration status.

Shkupolli worked as a grocer and in warehousing. He delivered goods to the Prisma supermarket chain.

He had been married to a Kosovar Albanian woman and had three children. He also had an on-and-off relationship with a Finnish woman both before and after his marriage. He lived in places that included Mikkeli and Espoo.

Murder Story

On the morning of 31 December 2009, shortly after 10:08, a shooting took place at the Prisma hypermarket in the Sello shopping mall in Leppävaara, Espoo, Finland. The gunman entered the store and shot three men and one woman who all worked at Prisma. The victims were aged 27, 40, 42 and 45.

Before the shooting at the mall, a woman who was the suspect's ex-girlfriend was found dead in an apartment in Espoo. She was also an employee of Prisma. The first victim was killed with a Smith & Wesson hunting knife. The body had a long and deep incised wound reaching the cervical spine. The apartment showed no signs of struggle.

Witnesses described the gunman as calm when he walked out of the grocery store immediately after the shooting. He was seen walking into another shop and then disappeared, which led to a major manhunt. Police used helicopters during the search.

Later the same day, the gunman was found dead in an apartment in Kirstinmäki, Espoo, in an apparent suicide. A neighbour heard the gunshot and police estimated the time as 11:13. The apartment was almost empty. Inside were a mattress, a framed photo of the ex-girlfriend, 14 fully loaded magazines for the gun, and a bag with an additional 273 cartridges.

The firearm used at the mall was a Czechoslovak-made 9 mm CZ 75 pistol, manufactured in 1984. That gun had originally been sold in Norway and had gone missing after an unsolved burglary in 1990. How the gun was acquired remained unknown.

Sello mall had more than 170 stores and was the largest in the Nordic region. On the day of the shooting, the mall contained between two and three thousand customers. Police evacuated and cordoned off the shopping centre and blocked a nearby railway station. Emergency services arrived with dozens of ambulances and several fire engines.

Finnish police speculated that the ex-girlfriend was the main target and that the shooter may have believed her new partner worked at Prisma.