Four people were stabbed on Monday in a supermarket in Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island, police reported after arresting the man believed to have been the perpetrator.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the mishap did not appear to be a terror-related assault, for which authorities have been on alert since 2019, when a white supremacist gunman claimed 51 lives in 2 mosques in Christchurch.

PM Ardern told reporters that “there is nothing to suggest, from the police’s perspective, that this is what they would define as a domestic terror event.”

Police said they had yet to formally interrogate or charge the suspected assailant and would probe the motive for the attack at the Countdown supermarket.

“However, on the face of what we currently know, we believe this was a random attack,” Paul Basham, commander of the Southern District, told reporters in Dunedin.

Basham said police arrived to find store shoppers had detained the perpetrator. The victims are in hospital along with the alleged offender, who is under police guard.

“This was a fast-moving and extremely traumatic event for every person in the supermarket – for the victims who were stabbed, for those who were present who tried to intervene and those who had to flee to a place of safety,” Basham added.