Italy's foreign ministry has issued a message of sympathy for the victims of Wednesday's "serious" bow and arrow attack by a 37-year-old Dane that killed five people in the Norwegian city of Kongsberg .
"Italy stands by #Norway and its people and expresses its condolences and solidarity with the families of the victims and the people injured following the serious attack in Kongsberg," read the tweet.
Investigators say that Espen Andersen Brathen, a 37-year-old Danish citizen and Muslim convert confessed to Wednesday's deadly attack in Kongsberg, a town 68 kilometres west of the capital Oslo.
The victims of Brathen's 30-minutre rampage were four women and a man aged between 50 and 70.
The attack was Norway's deadliest since far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 68 people, most of them teenagers, on the island of Utoya in July 2011 and eight others in a car-bomb attack in Oslo.
