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GOTHENBURG TERROR PLOT

CRIME

Four arrested for preparing terror crimes

Police in Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden, arrested four people during the early hours of Sunday on probable cause suspected of preparing terrorist crime, confirmed Sara Kvarnström, press officer of the Swedish Security Services (Säpo), to news agency TT.

Four arrested for preparing terror crimes

“The arrest was made with the help of the National Task Force and Gothenburg’s police force,” she said.

The National Task Force (Nationella insatsstyrkan) is the Swedish police’s special operations unit.

Sweden’s terror alert level has been at an ‘elevated’ level for a year, but Kvarnström reports that incidents in Gothenburg haven’t raised the alert level further.

“There’s an ongoing judgment made, and it can always be changed. But right now we’ve judged that there is no reason to take security-raising measures in Swedish society in general,” Kvarnström told TT.

“There’s no cause for the general public to be concerned,” she said.

Sara Kvarnström doesn’t want to comment further on the events of the night.

The arrest occurred during the night between Saturday and Sunday, near Röda Stens Konsthall, an art gallery by the Älvsborg Bridge.

Gothenburg’s International Biennial for Contemporary Art’s opening party was ongoing at the gallery, when the police arrived on the scene.

Just after midnight, the police asked the gallery’s manager to evacuate the area.

“I don’t know much more than that the police threw us out, and said they’d arrested four people suspected of terror crimes. Then they cordoned off the whole area,” said manager Mia Christersdotter Norman to daily newspaper Expressen.

Gothenburg police confirmed that an area around Röda Sten has been cordoned off.

On Sunday morning, the police website informed the public that the area was evacuated and cordoned off because of “a threat that implied serious danger to lives, health or extensive property damage.”

“I can’t say anything else, because we aren’t giving any information from here,” said Gunilla Gustafsson, of the police’s county communications centre, to TT.

Röda Sten now shows no sign of last night’s evacuation. Photographer Adam Ihse, from Scanpix photo agency, was at the spot earlier Sunday morning.

“There’s nothing left, no cars, no policemen. It looks exactly like normal,” said Ihse to TT.

The arrest was made ten years to the day since the terror attacks in New York.

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CRIME

Sweden charges Islamic State woman in landmark trial

Swedish prosecutors said they have brought genocide charges against a woman in the country's first court case over crimes committed by the Islamic State group against the Yazidi minority.

Sweden charges Islamic State woman in landmark trial

A prosecutor told AFP the 52-year-old woman was accused of keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria between 2014 and 2016.

She was charged with “genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes” on the grounds that her actions formed part of a broader campaign by the group (IS or Isis) against the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority.

The woman, who is a Swedish citizen, is in jail having already been sentenced by a Swedish court to six years in prison in 2022 for allowing her 12-year-old son to be recruited as a child soldier for Isis.

Senior prosecutor Reena Devgun told AFP that while investigating that case, authorities had received witness reports “that told us that she had kept slaves in Raqqa,” the former stronghold of the Islamic State group in northern Syria, prompting further investigations.

“If you take in Yazidis into your household when you are an Isis member or the wife of an Isis member and treat them this way, I argue that you are participating” in the broader campaign against them, Devgun said.

Devgun said the woman had kept nine people, three women and six children, in her home “as slaves”.

The women and children – who were kept in the house for between 20 days and seven months – were among other things made to perform household tasks.

Devgun said they had also been photographed, which the prosecutor argued “was done with the intention that they would be sold off”.

Evidence had mainly been gathered through witness accounts, from the victims and others that had visited the home at the time.

The crimes, which the woman denies, can carry a life sentence in Sweden.

Stockholm’s District Court said in a statement that the trial was scheduled to start on October 7th and was expected to last two months.

Around 300 Swedes or Swedish residents, a quarter of them women, joined IS in Syria and Iraq, mostly in 2013 and 2014, according to Sweden’s intelligence service Säpo.

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