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CRIME

17-year-old girl raped at music festival

Police are investigating the suspected rape of a teenage girl at a camping area at the Siesta music festival in southern Sweden.

Published: 2 June 2012 12:00 CEST
17-year-old girl raped at music festival

The victim, a 17-year-old girl, reported the rape to the police herself on Friday morning. According to her own account, the incident occurred early Friday morning, between 4am and 4.20am, on a camping spot at the festival’s main area.

The Siesta festival is a music festival held in Hässleholm, in southern Sweden.

The 17-year-old has given the police a description of her attacker, but no suspect has yet been arrested.

“We have some people who may have been in the area. We held interrogations yesterday, and will be continuing today,” Magnus Johansson of the north-eastern Skåne police force told news agency TT.

As well as interviewing possible witnesses, police forensic specialists spent Friday investigating the camping spot where the crime was reported to have occurred.

The police are unwilling to reveal any further details on Friday’s events, referring to the fact that no suspect has been arrested, and to the sensitive nature of the case.

“Right now I don’t want to give any information about what has happened or how it might have happened,” duty officer Anders Swenson of Kristianstad’s police force told local newspaper Norra Skåne.

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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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