Swedish Army Officer Shoots 7 to Death : Scandinavia: Police say accused assailant was apparently drunk. Crime is called most violent in nation’s modern history.

An army officer killed seven people with an assault rifle in a central Swedish town early Saturday in what police called the worst violent crime in modern Swedish history.

Five of those killed were young women serving in an army auxiliary unit and had been on a one-week course at the base where the gunman was stationed, police said.

The 24-year-old gunman was captured after a shootout with police and he confessed, police said. He was hospitalized with a gunshot wound in the hip.

His name was not released, but police said he apparently was drunk at the time of the killings in a park in Falun, an industrial and winter resort town about 145 miles northwest of Stockholm.

The violence of the attack was jarring in Sweden, which has 120 to 150 reported murders a year. Police said the only similar killing they could recall was when a gunman killed one person in 1992 in the central town of Mora.

A sixth woman was wounded Saturday and was hospitalized in good condition, said police spokesman Karl-Ivar Nilsson. He said the women all were about 20 years old.

They were walking home from a discotheque when they were shot about 2:30 a.m., Swedish television reported. Two men who were passing by were also killed.

“It was an execution,” said police spokesman Bertil Jansson.

“This incident is of the type that we unfortunately cannot protect ourselves from,” Minister of Defense Anders Bjorck said in a statement.

The army said the gunman was a second lieutenant at the Falun army base.

Army spokesman Tage Johansson told the national news agency, TTB, that all army officers are issued weapons. It was unclear how the gunman got his weapon past guards at the army base.

It was the worst death toll in a single attack in modern Swedish history, according to the National Swedish Investigation Department, Sweden’s federal police.