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Man held for abducting teen girl he met online

A man from southern Sweden is suspected of handcuffing and kidnapping a teenage girl he met on an internet chat room and taking her to Malmö late Tuesday night.

Published: 4 July 2012 12:49 CEST
Man held for abducting teen girl he met online
The man in the picture is not the man mentioned in the article

The 32-year-old met the girl in person in Kristianstad, southern Sweden, after the pair had chatted online. He then kidnapped her, driving her 100 kilometres south-west to Malmö where he was stopped and arrested by police.

The girl was handcuffed when police pulled the car over at 11.15pm on Tuesday night, according to Calle Persson of the Skåne police.

On Wednesday, the police in Kristianstad will take over the investigation and return the man to Kristianstad.

“We had a little information from the parents to go on,” explained Hans Nilsson of the Malmö police, adding that the kidnapper had only had been in contact with the teenager for “a short time” online.

At the time of the arrest, another police patrol headed to the man’s apartment in Malmö to see if there were other men waiting there for the pair to arrive.

“The girl explained in an interview, which is now completed, that she didn’t want to come with the man to Malmö,” said Nilsson.

The man’s intentions remain unclear, according to police; however Nilsson refused to reveal what the 32-year-old said in an interview conducted by police, other than to say that the interrogation had been completed.

An preliminary criminal investigation into the incident, as well a forensic investigation of the man’s car, is now underway.

TT/The Local/og

twitter.com/thelocalsweden

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INTERNET

EU greenlights €200M for Spain to bring super fast internet speeds to rural areas

Brussels has approved a plan which will bring high-speed broadband internet to the almost 1 in 10 people in Spain who live in underpopulated rural areas with poor connections, a way of also encouraging remote workers to move to dying villages. 

Published: 15 June 2021 10:09 CEST
EU greenlights €200M for Spain to bring super fast internet speeds to rural areas
The medieval village of Banduxo in Asturias. Photo: Guillermo Alvarez/Pixabay

The European Commission has given Spain the green light to use €200 million of the funds allocated to the country through the Next Generation recovery plan to offer internet speeds of up to 300 Mbps (scalable to 1Gb per second) to rural areas with slow internet connections. 

According to Brussels, this measure will help guarantee download speeds of more than 100 Mbps for 100 percent of the Spanish population in 2025.

Around 8 percent of Spain’s population live in areas where speeds above 100Mbs are not available, mostly in the 6,800 countryside villages in Spain that have fewer than 5,000 inhabitants.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen plans to travel to Madrid on Wednesday June 16th to hand over to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez the approved reform plan for Spain. 

Back in April, Spain outlined its Recovery and Resilience plan aimed at revitalising and modernising the Spanish economy following the coronavirus crisis, with €72 billion in EU grants over the next two years.

This includes green investments in energy transition and housing, boosting science and technology education and digital projects such as the fast-speed internet project which aims to avoid depopulation in rural areas. 

It’s worth noting that these plans set out €4.3 billion for broadband internet and 5G mobile network projects in rural areas in Spain, so this initial investment should be the first of many.

Over the past 50 years, Spain’s countryside has lost 28 percent of its population as Spaniards left to find jobs in the big cities. 

The gap has been widening ever since, local services and connections with the developed cities have worsened, and there are thousands of villages which have either been completely abandoned or are at risk of dying out. 

READ MORE:

How Spaniards are helping to save the country’s 4,200 villages at risk of extinction

rural depopulation spain

The pandemic has seen a considerable number of city dwellers in Spain move or consider a move to the countryside to gain space, peace and quiet and enjoy a less stressful life, especially as the advent of remote working in Spain can allow for this. 

Addressing the issue of poor internet connections is one of the best incentives for digital workers to move to the countryside, bringing with them their families, more business and a new lease of life for Spain’s villages.

READ ALSO:

Nine things you should know before moving to rural Spain

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