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CRIME

Rapper topping Swedish charts arrested on murder suspicions

The rapper who currently tops the Swedish charts on Spotify being held in pre-trial detention on suspicion of involvement in the murder of a former friend.

Published: 6 January 2020 12:24 CET
Rapper topping Swedish charts arrested on murder suspicions
An image from the cover of Yasin Byn's 2018 release Chicago: Photo: Madeniggamusic
Yasin Abdullahi, who goes by the name Yasin Byn, is currently leading the chart with XO, a song which lauds the intoxicating combination of Rémy Martin cognac and cannabis. 
 
According to the Expressen newspaper, he was arrested on the night before New Years' Eve, after a 20-year-old young man was found by with fatal shot wounds to the head in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby. The man, formerly a close friend of Yasin, died later that night. 
 
The rapper has won more than 640,000 monthly listeners on Spotify for songs glorifying his life of drugs, violence and gang crime, which have been played more than 50m times. 
 
He is believed to combine his successful musical career with the leadership of Shottaz, a gang based in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby.  In one rap, he boasts about his handling illegal weapons: ”If I'm sitting in a car. At least two Glocks in the back. Yasin Byn is hard to kill.” 
 
 
Abdullahi is one of a total of seven young men arrested in connection with the case. Two were released quickly, two were released after a custody hearing on Friday, and three, including Abdullahi, remain held on suspicion of murder. 
 
Frida Wallin, Abdullahi's defence lawyer told Expressen she had no comments to give on how her client planned to plead. 
 
Shottaz is currently involved in a bitter four-year gang war with its local rival Dödspatrullen (the death patrol), a gang war which was involved in the shooting of a double killing in Copenhagen last July. 
 
Abdullahi has been sentenced three times for drugs offences since 2015, and was in 2018 sentenced to prison for two years and three months after he was stopped by police in a car in the Stockholm suburb of Bromma, together with the victim of his current murder case, carrying a submachine gun and a semi-automatic pistol. 
 
As well as XO, Abdullahi has three other songs in the Spotify top 50 list.  
 
 

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POLITICS

Sweden Democrat justice committee chair steps down over hate crime suspicion

The Sweden Democrat head of parliament’s justice policy committee, Richard Jomshof, has stepped down pending an investigation into hate crimes.

Published: 13 September 2024 13:33 CEST
Updated: 13 September 2024 14:38 CEST
Sweden Democrat justice committee chair steps down over hate crime suspicion

Jomshof told news site Kvartal’s podcast that he had been called to questioning on Tuesday next week, where he’s been told he is to be formally informed he is suspected of agitation against an ethnic or national group (hets mot folkggrupp), a hate crime.

Prosecutor Joakim Zander confirmed the news, but declined to comment further.

“I can confirm what Jomshof said. He is to be heard as suspected on reasonable grounds of agitation against an ethnic or national group,” he told the TT newswire.

“Suspected on reasonable grounds” (skäligen misstänkt) is Sweden’s lower degree of suspicion, compared to the stronger “probable cause” (på sannolika skäl misstänkt).

The investigation relates to posts by other accounts which Jomshof republished on the X platform on May 28th.

One depicts a Muslim refugee family who is welcomed in a house which symbolises Europe, only to set the house on fire and exclaim “Islam first”. The other shows a Pakistani refugee who shouts for help and is rescued by a boat which symbolises England. He then attacks the family who helped him with a bat labelled “rape jihad”, according to TT.

Jomshof has stepped down from his position as chair of the justice committee while he’s under investigation.

“I don’t want this to be about my chairmanship of the committee, I don’t want the parties we collaborate with to get these questions again about whether or not they have confidence in me, but I want this to be about the issue at hand,” he said.

“The issue is Islamism, if you may criticise it or not, and that’s about free speech.”

It’s not the first time Jomshof has come under fire for his comments on Islam.

Last year, he called the Prophet Mohammed a “warlord, mass murderer, slave trader and bandit” in another post on X, sparking calls from the opposition for his resignation.

The Social Democrats on Friday urged Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, whose Moderate-led government relies on the Sweden Democrats’ support, not to let Jomshof return to the post as chair of the justice committee.

“The prime minister is to be the prime minister for the people as a whole,” said Ardalan Shekarabi, the Social Democrat deputy chairman of the justice committee, adding that it was “sad” that Jomshof had ever been elected chairman in the first place.

“When his party supports a person with clear extremist opinions, on this post, there’s no doubt that the cohesion of our society is damaged and that the government parties don’t stand up against hate and agitation,” TT quoted Shekarabi as saying.

Liberal party secretary Jakob Olofsgård, whose party is a member of the government but is seen as the coalition party that’s the furthest from the Sweden Democrats, wrote in a comment to TT: “I can say that I think it is reasonable that Richard Jomshof chooses to quit as chairman of the justice committee pending this process.”

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