Norwegian police now say 5 killed in attack were stabbed, not shot with bow and arrows

Five people killed in a small Norwegian town last week were all stabbed to death and not shot with a bow and arrows as initially suspected, police said on Monday.

Four women and one man,between the ages of 52 and 78 were killed in the Oct. 13 attacks in Kongsberg, a town about 70 kilometres west of the capital of Oslo.

Three people were also injured, including an off-duty police officer who was shot with the bow and arrow in the early phase of the 35-minute rampage.

But the assailant then appeared to have discarded this weapon, investigators said.

"Five people were killed with stabbing weapons," police inspector Per Thomas Omholt told a news conference.

He declined to say whether these were knives or larger weapons.

"Some were killed inside their own homes, others out in public."

Suspect being evaluated at psychiatric facility

Last Wednesday, policesaid a man armed witha bow and arrow had committed the killings. They later added that other weapons were also involved.

Omholt did not say why it had taken six days to clarify what weapon was used.

The sole suspect in the case, named by police last week as Espen Andersen Braathen, 37,is currently being held in a locked psychiatric facility.

Officers had looked into several lines of inquiry, including "anger, revenge, impulse, jihad, illness, provocation," Omholt said on Friday.

"The hypothesis that has been strengthened the most in the first days of the investigation is that the background is illness."

The death toll was the worst of any attack in Norway since 2011, when far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, most of them teenagers at a youth camp.