Swedish police accused of covering up sexual harassment by refugees

PanARMENIAN.Net - Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Löfven has condemned a “double betrayal” of women after allegations that police covered up sexual harassment by recent immigrants at a music festival in Stockholm. Meanwhile, reports have emerged of attacks on women in Malmö on New Year’s Eve, the Guardian reports.

Groups of refugees molested concertgoers at We Are Stockholm, Europe’s largest youth festival, in the summer of 2014, according to internal police memos obtained by Dagens Nyheter, a daily newspaper.

“These are so-called refugee youths, specifically from Afghanistan. Several of the gang were arrested for sexual molestation,” one police memo said.

Yet the official police report on the five-day festival attended by 170,000 young people aged mainly 13-19 made no mention of sexual harassment or assaults.

The reports come as police in Cologne, Germany, investigate hundreds of claims of assaults on women on New Year’s Eve. Officials say nearly all of the suspects in the attacks were “people with an immigrant background”. Police and the media have been accused of deliberately under-reporting the events in order not to encourage anti-immigrant sentiment.

In the Stockholm case, an anti-immigrant website linked to the far right Sweden Democrats, Nyeter Idag, claimed that Dagens Nyheter itself received reports about the assaults very soon after the festival but did not publicize them because they might benefit the far-right party, who campaign to stop immigration. Dagens Nyheter vehemently denied the claim, producing a full rebuttal on their website.

The festival took place a month before general elections in which the Sweden Democrats came third.

During the 2014 festival, organizers picked up on rumors of a new phenomenon, said Roger Ticoalu, head of events at the Stockholm city administration.

He said festival organizers did not have enough facts at the time to say anything definitive, and it would have been “totally irresponsible on our side to make anything public”. After the festival the organisers launched a programme with police and NGOs to encourage girls and young women to report harassment and to identify culprits, he said.

There were 20 reports of assault or harassment at the festival in 2015, Ticoalu said, but no evidence of any ethnic dimension to the attackers.