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CRIME

Drunken Christmas revelries lead to arrests

Many people went overboard in their Christmas merriment this year, with arrests for public drunkenness up across Sweden over the weekend.

Published: 26 December 2011 09:51 CET
Drunken Christmas revelries lead to arrests

Police i Skåne county, in the south of Sweden, took 44 people into custody for being drunk and disorderly the night between Sunday and Monday, in Blekinge there were 28, in Kalmar 46 and Gävleborg 45.

Police on the Baltic island of Gotland reported that many intoxicated party-goers created all sorts of mischief on the island.

“Maybe not the most peaceful Christmas you might hope for and the question remains whether Santa Claus will visit the homes of the naughty next year,” the local police website report concluded.

In central Malmö, two police officers were almost run down at 2am by a car they tried to stop for reckless driving. Further away two other police officers tried to stop the car, but they also fled to avoid being run over.

The police fired two shots at the car, but it continued towards E 65 highway, heading in the wrong direction to traffic. There, the police were able to pull the car over. A total of seven people in the car were arrested. The charges include two counts of attempted murder, attempted assault and reckless driving.

Three people were also fished out of the canal near a central night club in Malmö.

“We got the call that a woman was paddling around the canal and another woman had jumped in to save her. When we arrived we found three people lying in the water. We fished them out and drove them to the hospital,” said Marie Persson of the Skåne police to news agency TT.

A total of 45 people ended up sleeping off their drunkenness in police stations around Skåne.

“That’s double as many as an ordinary weekend, but not worse than last Christmas,” said Persson to TT.

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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.

Published: 20 September 2024 07:15 CEST
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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