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CRIME

Government plans amnesty to get grenades off Sweden’s streets

The Swedish government wants an amnesty period where grenades can be handed in to the police without punishment in an effort to get the explosives off the country's streets, Dagens Nyheter (DN) reports.

Published: 30 November 2017 08:54 CET
Government plans amnesty to get grenades off Sweden's streets
File photo of grenades from Bosnia that were confiscated on their way to Stockholm. Photo: Bosnian Police/TT

The hope is that criminals will choose to give up some of the grenades that are in circulation during the proposed three-month amnesty between October 2018 and January 2019.

“With previous weapons amnesties some thousands of weapons have come in, but we have no experience of this kind (with grenades). This is the first time,” Justice Minister Morgan Johansson told DN.

“This is linked to criminal gangs who in general have increased access to weapons which they use against one another and against the judicial system. We must get these off our streets.”

According to DN there were 27 instances of grenades exploding in Sweden during 2016, compared to 10 in 2015. Swedish PM Stefan Löfven announced earlier this year that he wants the minimum penalty for carrying a hand grenade in the country to be quadrupled.

READ ALSO: Penalty for carrying grenades should be quadrupled, Swedish PM says

The proposal for an amnesty will be brought to the Riksdag in February.

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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