Four people stabbed near shopping mall in Finland's Tampere

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Four people were injured in a stabbing attack near a shopping mall in the Finnish city of Tampere on Thursday and one person was arrested, but there were no indications of a terrorist or racist motive in the incident, police said.

A police statement gave no further details on the injuries from the attack in the Nordic country's third largest city but said the situation was under control and there was no further threat to the public.

"According to (our) current information, there is no reason to suspect that the act had a terrorist or racist motive," police said later in an update that gave no information on the arrested suspect.

Public broadcaster YLE earlier reported that traffic in the centre of Tampere - located some 180 kilometres (112 miles) north of the capital Helsinki - was at a standstill.

The daily Ilta-Sanomat reported that a witness saw bystanders giving first aid to two people lying on the ground at the time police arrived, and that, according to its information, the person arrested was a Finnish man in his twenties.

In May, three pupils were injured in an attack at a school in southern Finland and a fellow student suspected of carrying out the assault was apprehended.

Last year, a 12-year-old boy shot dead a fellow sixth-grader and severely injured two others at a school in the town of Vantaa. The boy said he had been a target of bullying and that this had motivated his attack.

(Reporting by Anna Ringstrom, Johan Ahlander, Greta Rosen Fondahn in Stockholm, Milla Nissi-Prussak in Gdansk; editing by Timothy Heritage, Sharon Singleton and Mark Heinrich)